Every day we meet companies who have long ago already understood the value in incrementality measurement, or those who just recently got “forced” into it. From time to time, especially during conferences, or while onboarding companies to our platform, we get to witness the moment of epiphany.  A channel which represented 20% or 30% or sometimes even over 50% of spend in a certain country, could be proven as not yielding incremental value. It’s often a bummer to discover this, and some will go as far as challenge the measurement in any possible way – but the truth doesn’t lie.

Since our own platform recognizes opportunities for retrospective measurement, when we onboard a new customer, within the first day, the platform already has suggestions for what should get measured. To get more insights into how we actually measure incrementality at a deeper level check out this piece. 

The truth usually goes through 3 phases:

The first stage is easy: A very quick incrementality measurement shows an insight that a channel is not and has not been yielding incrementality for some time.

The second stage is the hard one. It’s as if the second stage is the first 3 stages of the Kubler-Ross model of grief: Denial, anger, and bargaining.
The bargaining will often involve: “but attribution shows results”, or “this is a really good channel!”. 
The problem with incrementality is that it does not (and should not) care about attribution, nor the goodness of channels. To go further – most of the channels our customers work with are well known platforms. Platforms like Meta, Google, Snapchat, TikTok, Twitter, Apple Search Ads, and so on. When seeing no incrementality, it by no means says that the platform has been utilizing malicious attribution gaming tactics. The insight simply says: the spend you have, is currently not yielding incremental results.

The third step will typically involve a test. A customer will decrease, or completely turn off said channel in the country in question, both allowing them a measurement opportunity, but also, allowing the customer to see in their own eyes, that pausing the channel, leads to no negative outcomes. Total volumes remain neutral, while ad spend decreases, meaning higher profit margin, and more budgets to allocate to the channels that do yield incremental outcomes.

The whole thing typically looks something like this:

The last stage is the stage where depression and acceptance get materialized. Acceptance that the measurement insight was correct, and that the marketer now has freed up the budget to test new channels, or new strategies.