You keep hearing one word consistently cutting through the noise in modern marketing: incremental. 

But what does it really mean, and why should you care?

Imagine unlocking the secret to maximizing every dollar spent, driving real growth, and making data-driven decisions with confidence.

In today’s privacy-conscious landscape, where tracking customer behavior is becoming increasingly challenging, understanding incrementality is more crucial than ever.

Get ready to unravel the mystery of incrementality and reveal how it can transform your marketing strategy from good to exceptional.

What Does ‘Incremental’ Mean in Marketing?

An incremental effect in your marketing strategy highlights the true impact your campaign is driving.
For example, you are running a sales campaign, and the results show 20,000 orders. That’s great, but do you know how many orders would have come in organically without your campaign? This exact question is answered by the concept of incrementality.
Other questions that incrementality helps to solve include: 

• “How much should I increase my current spend by?”

• “Does it make sense to add this channel to the mix?”

• “Are my discounts and promotions truly working?”

Shifting the mindset from an attributional standpoint to thinking in incremental terms empowers marketers and CMOs to drive true business impact.

Incremental Models vs. Legacy Models

Attribution models have long been mistaken as tools to prove incrementality. However, attribution is about connecting an event (e.g., conversion, signup, download) to a marketing activity (e.g., paid search, social campaign, video view).
Attribution models show how many people you have reached, but do not prove whether those touchpoints were incremental. 

Additionally, recent privacy changes (CCPA, CCPR, GDPR, iOS 14+) have made it even more challenging for attribution models to track and attribute accurately.

As a result, the best companies are now shifting towards focusing their strategies on first-party data, and employing solutions such as Marketing Mix Models (MMM) and incrementality tests.

Marketing Mix Models are useful for identifying correlations in historical data and predicting future outcomes. However, they are often time-consuming and costly, lack frequency, and do not measure true incrementality.

In contrast, incrementality tests directly measure the true causal impact of marketing activities, providing a comprehensive and accurate view of both online and offline efforts. These tests are faster and based on actual sales data, offering a more precise understanding of your marketing effectiveness.

Incrementality Testing vs. A/B Testing

Traditionally, marketers have relied on A/B testing to establish incremental results. The problem with iterative A/B testing, though, is that it’s a time-consuming and costly activity, and it often leaves marketers “blind” for a given period before seeing results. Scaling the A/B testing approach also hinders business growth, by assigning to certain prospects or customers a treatment while others do not receive it. As an example – if you want to run a test in your best-performing market, you cannot afford to split this market into treatment and control groups and then assign ad treatments randomly.

How to Measure Incrementality in Marketing

Today, with the power of statistical modeling, it is possible to create more efficient testing frameworks that allow you to see results from day one of the experiment launch.
This enables marketers to take immediate action, present results to stakeholders, and monitor the effectiveness of their campaigns in real time.
Moreover, tests can be designed to isolate the effect of a specific marketing campaign in key markets by controlling for the effect with other, less important markets. This is achieved by building synthetic control groups on a geographical level, allowing for experimentation that targets all key markets while controlling for the effect with markets that are less of a priority.
This approach ensures that business flow is not hindered, and allows for more accurate measurement of incremental impact.

You Need an Integrated Approach to Marketing Measurement

At BlueAlpha, we believe in data-driven decision-making and rigorous measurement. We consider incrementality testing as the ultimate source of truth, as a well-designed and executed test provides clear insights into your true marketing performance.
At the same time, while we understand the importance of incrementality testing, we also recognize that it is not sufficient on its own. Therefore, we combine the concepts of Marketing Mix Models (MMM) with incrementality testing to offer a comprehensive solution.

Our product enables marketers to understand the performance contributions of their paid channels in relation to one another, driven by the results of incrementality tests.
By integrating incrementality testing with Marketing Mix Models, we overcome the complexities of MMMs, which act as the strategic compass for your business. The assumptions and predictions of MMMs are enhanced by the causal results achieved through our incrementality testing platform.

This approach combines the best of both worlds, helping marketers measure marketing incrementality, allocate budgets efficiently, and maximize growth.
At BlueAlpha, we provide a robust framework that ensures your marketing strategies are not only effective, but also grounded in rigorous, data-driven insights.