MATCHED FILTER THEORY APPLIED TO MARKETING MESSAGE OPTIMIZATION: SNR MAXIMIZATION VIA CAUCHY–SCHWARZ EQUALITY

Abstract

The dominant assumption in digital advertising, that customer acquisition scales proportionally with budget, is contradicted by meta-analytic evidence. Sethuraman, Tellis, and Briesch [1] analyzed 751 short-term advertising elasticities across 56 econometric studies and found an average elasticity of 0.12, meaning a 1% budget increase yields roughly 0.12% additional sales. Only 53% of these elasticities were significantly different from zero. Simultaneously, structural alignment interventions, such as matching ad messaging to landing page content, have produced conversion improvements ranging from 47% to 212% at zero incremental spend

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