Publications
Publications
- March 2016
- HBS Case Collection
Advertising Experiments at RestaurantGrades
By: Weijia Dai, Hyunjin Kim and Michael Luca
Abstract
This exercise provides students with a data set consisting of results from a hypothetical experiment, and asks students to make recommendations based on the data. Through this process, the exercise teaches students to analyze, design, and interpret experiments. The context is an experiment in a hypothetical restaurant review company called RestaurantGrades (RG) whose main source of revenue comes from advertising. Like Yelp and TripAdvisor, RG advertisements are shown above the organic search results when someone searches on the page. RG is trying to understand whether its current advertising package is effective in practice. To do this, RG has run an experiment with two treatment arms and a control group of restaurants. The control group has no advertising, the first treatment arm consists of giving restaurants RG's current advertising package, and the second treatment arm is an alternative package that RG designed with a different approach to consumer targeting. Students are given the data to analyze, and asked to make a recommendation about which, if either, advertising package is effective.
Keywords
Experimental Methods; Analytics; Social Media; Web Technology; Marketing; Digital Marketing; Analysis; Performance Effectiveness
Citation
Dai, Weijia, Hyunjin Kim, and Michael Luca. "Advertising Experiments at RestaurantGrades." Harvard Business School Spreadsheet Supplement 916-702, March 2016.