Incrementality in marketing measures the additional value a specific campaign or channel brings to your business—such as increased leads, enhanced conversion rates, or higher engagement—by assessing the positive effect, or incremental lift, that would not have occurred organically.
It isolates a campaign’s contribution from other initiatives so you can accurately measure its impact. By identifying which marketing strategies deliver the highest additional value, you can optimize budget allocation and better justify your spend.
No wonder there’s a growing shift from traditional return on ad spend (ROAS) to incremental return on ad spend (iROAS), as marketers seek a more nuanced and holistic approach to measuring campaigns performance—in other words, an approach that goes beyond deterministic attribution.
Incrementality vs attribution: Key differences
Incrementality and attribution are complementary approaches to understanding marketing performance. Imagine you run a campaign with paid search ads and email marketing.
- Attribution helps you to understand which channel was the last touchpoint before a conversion. You can use this information to allocate budget to converting channels, but keep in mind that attribution may overstate the value of specific channels by giving credit only based on interaction sequence. Your customer might have first seen a paid search ad, but finally converted after getting the email. Even though the email might be credited with the conversion, the initial exposure to the product or service came from the paid ad.
- Incrementality reveals how much of the observed conversions are genuinely driven by a certain campaign versus what would have occurred naturally. You can run an incrementality test showing an ad to a set of customers while withholding it from a similar group. If those who didn’t see the ad still converted, then the true additional impact of the ads is lower than initially thought.
| Approach | Incrementality | Attribution |
| Description | Measures the additional value or impact of a marketing activity by isolating its effect from other factors | Assigns credit to various customer touchpoints with a brand, such as ad clicks, social media engagement, email opens, and website visits |
| Methodology | Relies on experimental design, such as A/B testing. It compares results between exposed and control groups to isolate the effect of marketing activities | Typically uses rule-based or data-driven algorithms to distribute credit across touchpoints. Common models include last-click, first-click, linear, and multi-touch attribution |
Why marketing incrementality matters
Incrementality in marketing helps you make data-driven media decisions and avoid overestimating success due to external influences like market trends and economic conditions. Benefits include:
- Better understanding of the true impact of your marketing efforts: By distinguishing between actual performance improvements and organic results, you can assess return on investment more precisely. This assessment leads to a more accurate evaluation of campaign effectiveness.
- Budget optimization: With Gartner reporting that 64% of CMOs lack the budget they need to execute their strategy, maximizing resources becomes more important than ever. Assessing the true incremental lift generated allows you to focus on the most effective efforts and scale back on those with lower impact.
- Reduced wasted spend: Identifying campaigns generating genuine incremental value allows you to allocate your budget more strategically—for example, avoiding investing in media channels that are not delivering a positive ROI.
You can answer questions like:
- What is the true effectiveness of each of my marketing channels? Incrementality measurement can help you determine which channels are driving the most incremental sales and which ones may be cannibalizing each other.
- Am I reaching my target audience efficiently? By measuring incrementality, you can identify which demographics or segments are most responsive to your advertising and allocate your budget accordingly.
- How can I optimize my marketing spend? Incrementality testing can help you identify areas where you can reduce your advertising spend without sacrificing results, such as by cutting back on underperforming channels or refining your targeting.
Keep learning: How to identify the right channel for product launches
How to measure incrementality
Measuring incrementality in marketing involves isolating the specific impact of a campaign or initiative from other factors.
A common method is through controlled experiments (A/B testing).
- Randomly split your target audience into two groups (control and test), then expose the test group to the marketing campaign being evaluated.
- Compare the performance of the test group to the control group to determine the incremental impact of the campaign.
This way, you understand how much of the observed change in outcomes (e.g., sales, website traffic, conversions) can be directly attributed to the campaign, rather than other factors such as seasonal trends or broader economic conditions.
With AI tools, measuring marketing incrementality has become more accurate and efficient. Three-fourths of marketers surveyed by Salesforce are already experimenting with or fully implementing AI.
One use case is to identify intricate patterns and correlations within data that traditional methods might miss. AI also helps to create sophisticated models that accurately predict the impact of marketing campaigns.
Keen: All the analysis you need to unlock incremental lift
Keen’s marketing mix modeling (MMM) platform leverages AI to empower marketers with dynamic budget optimization based on real-time performance and predictive analytics, ensuring funds are allocated to the most effective channels for optimal incremental lift.
You can integrate results from diverse methodologies, including incrementality, into the Keen Platform, for a comprehensive and triangulated understanding of marketing impact. You can isolate incremental vs base volume, quantifying the incremental for each tactic. And by comparing the incremental revenue driven by each tactic to the spend in that tactic, you can determine ROI.
Start planning with confidence and precision. Get a free Keen trial—and make the most out of incrementality in marketing to optimize your spend.
