[, , ] Imagine that you are working as a data scientist at a tech company. Someone from the marketing department asks for your help in evaluating an experiment that they are planning in order to measure the Return on Investment (ROI) for a new online ad campaign. ROI is defined to be the net profit from the campaign divided by the cost of the campaign. For example, a campaign that had no effect on sales would have an ROI of -100%; a campaign where profits generated were equal to costs would have an ROI of 0; and a campaign where profits generated were double the cost would have an ROI of 200%.
Before launching the experiment, the marketing department provides you with the following information based on their earlier research (in fact, these values are typical of the real online ad campaigns reported in Lewis and Rao [-@lewis_unfavorable_2015])
- the mean sales per customer follows a log-normal distribution