This thesis measures the effects of cause-related marketing (CRM) for plumbing, electrician, and

pest control services on the number of online ad clicks and related purchasing behavior.

Although there is a considerable academic literature on CRM, we found no existing studies

concerning its application in the home service industry. To address this gap, two new datasets

were collected to measure the CRM effect based on different experimental designs.

The first dataset (Chapter 2) came from a field study based on a real-world ad campaign for a

plumbing brand in the U.S. with national reach. This Facebook ad campaign was comprised of

identical pairs of CRM and nonCRM ads that differed only by the inclusion of a CRM message

on one ad from each pair. The CRM ads attracted 86% more clicks than the nonCRM ads. After

controlling for differences in demographic and time-of-day composition of the impressions

presented to FB users, the CRM effect survived robustly as a 58% increase in expected licks. (An

impression is an instance of an ad shown on-screen, and impressions is a count variable

measuring the number of times an ad was shown for the first time to a unique Facebook user.)

The second study (Chapter 3) was an experimental survey design that provided much improved

control over which ad impressions were presented to the experimental participants. Participants

made 15 binary choices between otherwise similar pairs of CRM and nonCRM ads. The CRM

effect on clicks was a 22.6 percentage-point increase in the probability of choosing the CRM.

This difference is equivalent to an odds ratio of 1.58, which is strikingly similar in size to that of

the estimated CRM effect in the FB field study. Thus, the between-group CRM effect measured

in the FB field data was reasonably well-replicated by the within-person CRM effect in the

survey data.

The final chapter (Chapter 4) reflects on methodological caveats (things about our experimental

design that we would do differently “next time”) that future studies of CRM in the home service

industry could benefit from. Chapter 4 also discusses real-world implications of the empirical

findings from this thesis for the author’s pay-per-call marketing agency and the digital marketing

industry more generally