Interpreting Basic Statistics

You've been recently hired as a marketing analyst in an advertising agency. You are assigned the task of assessing the impact of direct marketing promotions. Your goal is to provide a valid assessment of the performance of individual campaigns, as well as objective and reliable cross-campaign comparisons.

Each campaign is comprised of multiple mailings, and each mailing is measured in terms of the response rate, which is the number of consumers who respond to the mailing. The performance of the overall campaign is determined by averaging the response rates of individual mailings.

You have the following information:

Campaign 1 Response Rates (%) Campaign 2 Response Rates (%)

Mailing A 1.4 1.2

Mailing B 0.9 0.5

Mailing C 0.4 1.0

Mailing D 5.3 0.7

Mailing E 1.1 0.6

- Compute the measures of central tendency and dispersion for Campaign 1 and Campaign 2.

- When describing the average response rate for each campaign, identify which measure of central tendency you would use and why.

- Compare the variability in the response rates of the two campaigns. As a decision maker, what conclusions would you draw on the basis of that comparison?

- Identify which of the two campaigns delivered better results in terms of response rates and why.

- Identify the questions you would ask regarding the above-detailed response rates.