The most common question we get asked about incrementality measurement is “doesn’t it require experiments?” While other incrementality platforms do require clients to run tests, at INCRMNTAL we know experimentation is not only unnecessary when measuring the success of advertising activities, but also potentially detrimental to brands’ ROI.

In fact, INCRMNTAL is the only incrementality product on the market that doesn’t require advertisers to turn ad campaigns on and off to compare results. Instead, we use causal data science to determine what impact each marketing activity has on sales, so brands can understand what works and what doesn’t, and consequently allocate their budgets effectively.

Experimentation only allows brands to measure a fraction of their activity 

Marketers already make a lot of changes to their campaigns. Most brands will advertise across multiple channels, using a variety of ad formats and iterations. The majority are also continuously optimising campaigns, adjusting budgets, launching new creative sets, and activating new media vendors.

With so much activity and adjustments going on in real-time, you can’t possibly measure the impact of each change by testing. Even experimenting on a quarter of that would be hugely laborious and costly. Yet, it’s still vital you understand the impact of everything you’re doing and this is where our solution comes in.  

Unlike other incrementality platforms, the root of our technology is your operational marketing changes. We’ve built a fully automated change log, which utilises AI algorithms to detect any changes you've made to marketing activities, across all channels online and offline. 

The platform treats your operational marketing adjustments as micro-experiments. Allowing you to measure any activity, as well as any real-world event that causes an impact on your metrics, all while campaigns and channels are running. It provides results on a daily basis on one dashboard, as opposed to experimentation analytics, which can take weeks or months, meaning brands could be wasting significant budget on channels or mediums that aren’t even performing, while they wait for the results. 

Experimentation doesn’t account for external influences

Experimentation also doesn’t account for external factors, which can heavily influence marketing success or failure. Seasonality, holidays, special days, and external advertiser specific factors such as weather, stock market trends, or promotions can all have a significant impact on the performance of your marketing campaigns. 

By pausing activities across certain campaigns, channels or geographies before restarting them, requires marketers to stop a campaign for a notable time period to determine any noteworthy differences. Given variables like the weather are constantly changing, it’s not possible to accurately assess their impact on revenue by stopping and starting campaigns.

So why are marketers still using experiments?

Experimentation is still prolific in marketing measurement, with many marketers not even aware that it’s possible to measure all of their activity without the need for testing. With the deprecation of the third-party cookie and the need for privacy-safe measurement solutions that don’t require identifiers, many have turned to alternative methods of measurement, which largely utilise experiments. 

Controlled experiments may give a marketer a sense of control, but measurement in the age of privacy requires a deeper consideration to factor in ad vendor audience overlap, seasonality factors, competition factors, and any external factor that could influence marketing performance.

We can’t make it any clearer, using experiments when measuring your marketing is ineffective, time-consuming, costly and it isn’t even feasible to test against all the changes you make on a daily basis. By using INCRMNTAL, marketers can test the incrementality of a channel, campaign, ad group, or a single marketing change, in line with any external factors that may be influencing success, all at the touch of a button, and get results within seconds! INCRMNTAL really is the future of marketing measurement, enabling AI-informed analysis without user-level data or experimentation.

If you want to learn more, visit INCRMNTAL or book a demo today!