I don't doubt that marketing works but always had a feeling that a lot of it is busy work (e.g. reorganizing AdWords campaign structures every couple of weeks for no apparent reason) and a lot of data-driven success stories probably boil down to right time right place.
Clean randomized experiments naturally provide good answers and are especially feasible in this space but performing those properly, especially with regard to attribution and user identification, presents a whole zoo of issues that are inherently different from what a lot of marketers seem to work on.
Clean randomized experiments naturally provide good answers and are especially feasible in this space but performing those properly, especially with regard to attribution and user identification, presents a whole zoo of issues that are inherently different from what a lot of marketers seem to work on.