We assemble a unique data set that combines information on supermarket feature advertising with path-tracking data on consumers’ movement within the store as well as purchase information. Using these novel data, we trace out how advertising affects consumer behavior along the path-to-purchase. We find advertising has no significant effect on the number of consumers visiting the category being advertised. The null effect is precisely estimated. At the upper bound of the confidence interval, a one-standard-deviation shift in advertising increases category traffic by only 1.3%. We do find a significant effect at the lower end of the conversion funnel. A one-standard-deviation change in advertising (evaluated at the point estimate) increases category-level sales by 10%. We further decompose the impact on sales and find the increase is driven by the same number of consumers buying a larger number of products of the same brand. We find no evidence of spillover effects of advertising between categories that are stocked in proximity of each other, nor between different products in the same category. Two mechanisms are consistent with these patterns: consumers retrieve memory of the ad only when interacting with the category or only consumers wanting to purchase the brand choose to consume the ad.

中文翻译：

---

广告对转化渠道的影响

我们组装了一个独特的数据集，该数据集将有关超市特色广告的信息与有关商店内消费者活动的路径跟踪数据以及购买信息结合在一起。利用这些新颖的数据，我们可以追踪广告如何影响消费者沿着购买路径的行为。我们发现广告对访问所广告类别的消费者数量没有显着影响。零效应被精确估计。在置信区间的上限，广告中的一个标准差转移仅使类别访问量增加了1.3％。我们确实在转化渠道的下端发现了明显的影响。广告的单标准偏差更改（按点估计进行评估）将类别级别的销售额提高了10％。我们进一步分解了对销售的影响，发现增长是由购买相同品牌的大量产品的相同数量的消费者推动的。我们发现没有证据表明广告在彼此相邻放置的类别之间或同一类别的不同产品之间具有溢出效应。有两种机制与这些模式一致：消费者仅在与类别交互时才检索广告的记忆，或者只有希望购买品牌的消费者才选择消费广告。