Pinterest is considering an offline billboard advertising campaign in selected cities to increase brand awareness and downstream user growth. As the data scientist, design the measurement plan.
Address the following:
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How would you design the billboard campaign and define success metrics? Consider awareness, traffic, conversion, and guardrail metrics.
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How would you test effectiveness? Discuss an ideal randomized geo experiment and what you would do if randomization is not feasible.
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Explain the difference between Propensity Score Matching (PSM) and Propensity Score Weighting (PSW or IPW). What estimand does each target, and what does each method effectively optimize for?
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How would you calculate sample size or minimum detectable effect for this study? State the experimental unit, the main formula, and any adjustments needed for clustered or geo-based experiments.
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What tradeoffs and failure modes would you watch for, such as spillovers, seasonality, selection bias, delayed effects, and budget constraints?