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Comment by tofukid | Hacker News Reader

It’s simple. You use a URL with the campaign id, and store that when the customer clicks through, then when a sale is made you count that towards the campaign. In offline advertising people would achieve this using campaign-specific phone numbers or discount code given in the ad.

Online advertising math is not rocket science. If ROAS is positive you continue the campaign, if not you abandon it or try other methods.

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Maybe if your business is simple and purchase cycle fast.

For the majority of companies that’s not the case.

There are other confounding factors, like the margin attached to that revenue.

Sometimes understanding the actual profitability of a sale can take years.

As others have said for big brands it can be incredibly hard to do real attribution.

Guess we'll skip branding and awareness campaigns, ignore all post-view purchases, not use cross-device or cross-channel attribution, and not look at attribution of offline conversion/visitation activity.

If the only thing you do is Search and Email Blasts, the query string on your URL might work okay.

The query string method will not provide stats for the above point; but the newer methods e.g. using the FB pixel that tracks users based on the user's email/userid you create can accomplish much of that (only offline conversions are difficult, but there are still modern ways to match an offline customer with their past ad exposure e.g. if you get their email/phone on purchase...)

TFA spends a long time belaboring the point that this is not correct. Because many people who click on your URL would have bought the item anyway.

Direct conversion to sale via clickthroughs are an almost invisibly small part of online ads . No advertiser uses only that metric for determining ROAS.

Which metrics are you referring to?

I can’t speak for ad agencies, but every company I’ve worked with to do advertising measured ROAS using customer attribution (which ad campaign brought which customer, and how much did that customer spend).

> which ad campaign brought which customer

And how do they determine that?

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