Using a large-scale experiment involving 3.7 million treated subjects on Yahoo!, we measure the ability of online display advertising to cause new account sign-ups at an online business. We experiment with two dimensions of media choice: banner-shaped ads versus large rectangular ads, and Yahoo!...

Online advertising offers unprecedented opportunities for measurement. A host of new metrics, clicks being the leading example, have become widespread in advertising science. New data and experimentation platforms open the door for firms and researchers to measure true causal effects of...

Yahoo! Research partnered with a nationwide retailer to study the effects of online display advertising on both online and in-store purchases. We use a randomized field experiment on 3 million Yahoo! users who are also past customers of the retailer. We find statistically significant evidence...

“North” ads, or sponsored listings appearing just above the organic search results, generate the majority of clicks and revenues for search engines. In this paper, we ask whether the competing north ads exert externalities on each other: does increasing the number of rival north ads decrease...

Online consumer data presents new opportunities for measuring the effects of advertising. We combine search query data with the commercial schedule for the 2011 Super Bowl to measure the causal impact of TV advertising on consumer search behavior. Examining 46 of 67 Super Bowl commercials, we...

We study the impact of display advertising on user search behavior using a field experiment. In such an experiment, the treatment group users are exposed to some display advertising campaign, while the control group users are not. During the campaign and the post-campaign period we monitor the...

This thesis investigates the effects of online advertising on human behavior: clicks, new-account sign-ups, and retail sales. Five chapters cover natural and field experiments used to measure these effects for both display and search advertising. The first chapter uses a natural experiment on...