Do mobile banner ads increase sales? Yes, in the offline channel

Firms allocate increasingly large budgets to mobile banner advertising. Yet, existing research paid only scant attention to the sales effects of mobile banner ads. In this paper, we fill this gap by determining the offline and online sales impact of a large-scale mobile banner advertising campaign. As part of a geographical field experiment, over 3.5 million mobile banner ads were served to a predetermined geographical area. We determine the offline and online sales effects of the mobile banner ad campaign by analyzing twenty months of sales data for regions covering the entire country of the Netherlands. Relying on a difference-in-difference approach and two matching methods, we demonstrate an offline sales increase of around 2%. The online sales effect is not significant. We conclude that firms can use mobile banner advertising to boost offline sales. We find no evidence for cross-channel sales cannibalization.