Nandita Summers works at Modus, a store that caters to fashion for young
adults. Nandita is responsible for the store's online advertising and
promotion budget. For the past year, she has studied search engine
optimization and has been purchasing keywords and display advertising on
Google, Facebook, and Twitter. In order to analyze the effectiveness of her
efforts and to decide whether to continue online advertising or move her
advertising dollars back to traditional print media, Nandita collects the
following data:
1\. Nandita performs a regression analysis, comparing each month's online
advertising expense with that month's revenue. Verify that she obtains the
following result:
Revenue \(=\$ 51,999.64-(0.98 \times \text { Online advertising expense })\)
2\. Plot the preceding data on a graph and draw the regression line. What does
the cost formula indicate about the relationship between monthly online
advertising expense and monthly revenues? Is the relationship economically
plausible?
3\. After further thought, Nandita realizes there may have been a flaw in her
approach. In particular, there may be a lag between the time customers click
through to the Modus website and peruse its social media content (which is
when the online ad expense is incurred) and the time they actually shop in the
physical store. Nandita modifies her analysis by comparing each month's sales
revenue to the advertising expense in the prior month. After discarding
September revenue and August advertising expense, show that the modified
regression yields the following:
Revenue \(=\$ 28,361.37+(5.38 \times \text { Online advertising expense })\)
4\. What does the revised formula indicate? Plot the revised data on a graph.
Is this relationship economically plausible?
5\. Can Nandita conclude that there is a cause-and-effect relationship between
online advertising expense and sales revenue? Why or why not?