Till date, I must confess that I have never read a “marketing” paper. So, when one of my friends wanted my comments on a paper that is published in JMR , June 2014, titled “Decomposing the Impact of Advertising: Augmenting Sales with Online Search Data ”, I thought I might encounter a lot of marketing jargon and might be put off. Thankfully there is lot less of it in the paper.

The paper is very interesting as it uses Google trends as a proxy for consumer pre-purchase interest. Historically most of the models that have been built have never decomposed sales data in to pre purchase component and a conversion rate component. The reason being that the data relating to pre purchase activity was tough to obtain and had all sorts of problems. Thanks to Google trends , one can get all the real time data that one wants. So, the authors of the paper use Google trends data relating to automobile purchase queries and use that as a proxy for modeling the latent state variable, “consumer interest in prepurchase information”.  The authors analyze 21 cars in 4 segments and conclude some cool things which would not have been possible with out decomposing sales in to various components.

Here is a brief note with my comments