Abstract
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