UNSW School of Economics
ECON1203 Business and Economic Statistics
Session 1, 2015
Major project: AdVantage
Purpose
The idea is of this assignment is to simulate a professional work task involving statistical analysis. It is designed to help students learn about what is involved in undertaking basic statistical analysis to understand a real-world problem, and communicating the results of this analysis to business stakeholders.

Context and Problem
You are working as a business analyst for Crunch-IT Consultants, a Sydney-based company that specializes in providing statistical consulting services to small and medium-sized companies. Your company is contacted by AdVantage, a designer of online advertisements whose business model is based on selling their design services to businesses that place ads on social media sites. You attend a breakfast meeting with a senior Crunch-IT consultant and
AdVantage’s owner-operator, Arnold Valenzuela, to discuss Arnold’s concerns. At the meeting, Arnold says:
“Well, first, I’d like to know whether any of the four designers I’ve hired are underperforming relative to their peers. It’s easy to see that there are big differences across my designers in the styles of their ads, and I can’t help thinking that maybe some styles drive traffic better than others – but maybe that’s not the case. Of course, as with any business, ensuring I am offering a value proposition to clients is key to generating repeat business and word-ofmouth referrals, and so I’d like to see at least a 3% click-through rate on all the ads that we design that get put to market.
Second, with the increasing diversity of products we advertise and the increasing range of websites where our ads appear, I wonder if there is a particular niche where we do best. For example, I’ve heard anecdotally that our ads placed on Twitter generate lots of