What Is Cost Aggregation?

Cost aggregation is the process of pulling together your total advertising spend across all platforms, channels, and sources into a single, coherent dataset. It’s the step every marketer thinks is happening automatically – until they actually try to measure incrementality or ROI, and realize half the numbers don’t match up.

It sounds basic, but it’s anything but. Between Google Ads, Meta, TikTok, programmatic platforms, influencer budgets, and even internal promotions, ad spend is often fragmented across dozens of dashboards and invoices. Without cost aggregation, you’re not doing measurement – you’re playing a game of financial whack-a-mole.

Why Cost Aggregation Matters

Let’s put it bluntly: you can’t measure ROI, ROAS, or incrementality without knowing how much you spent – and where. If your measurement platform is blind to 20% of your spend (because the cost data lives in a spreadsheet somewhere), the insights you get will be just as incomplete.

And when you rely on siloed platform-reported data (hello, SANs), you risk:

Double-counting conversions, without realizing the same dollar is being credited twice

Over-valuing platforms that optimize for attribution, not outcomes

Under-funding campaigns that quietly do the heavy lifting without flashy last-touch glory

Cost aggregation brings order to the chaos. It enables apples-to-apples comparison across channels and grounds your attribution or incrementality model in reality – not marketing fiction.

At INCRMNTAL, Here's What We Believe

We believe measurement should be objective, comprehensive, and actionable. Cost aggregation isn’t just a backend task – it’s the starting line. Without it, every insight is suspect.

That’s why INCRMNTAL integrates with platforms, APIs, and manual data pipelines to ensure our clients have a full, aggregated view of spend. We don’t just ingest performance data – we ingest the economic truth of what you paid, when, and where.

Because if you’re spending seven figures on ads, but your measurement model is built on partial data, you’re not saving money – you’re losing it more quietly.

Cost aggregation is the plumbing that makes real marketing measurement possible. Without it, ROI is guesswork, ROAS is distorted, and incrementality becomes irrelevant. Don’t trust any platform or person that skips this step – they’re just building castles on sand.