Normally, our articles focus on macro or niche topics within the marketing industry. We make a conscious effort to avoid overtly promoting the INCRMNTAL platform in our publicly shared content and strive for a more restrained approach in our blog.

However, this particular article will push beyond these boundaries by spotlighting a distinctive feature seemingly exclusive to the INCRMNTAL platform: Time Machine Measurement."

Time Machine is a unique feature which only INCRMNTAL has, allowing marketers to go back in time and measure What would have happened if we didn’t make the change we did ? 

Examples: 

• How many incremental conversions did we get when we started Snapchat in November?
• How many and did we get incremental revenues by increasing bids on Apple Search Ads by $2 in April?
• Was it a good idea to decrease the spend on TikTok 3 months ago? Was that the reason why we lost 20% of our install base? Or was it just the seasonality effect?

INCRMNTAL’s platform is unique in the sense that it allows marketers to measure the incrementality of their past actions, and that’s because of the methodology which continuously answers the question: “what would have happened if this change did not happen”

We’ll explain how our technology does this, after we “interrupt” this article by explaining how incrementality measurement used to be done.

Legacy Incrementality Measurement

In the olden days of 2000 – 2020, the only way advertisers were able to measure the incrementality their channels and campaigns were yielding meant conducting experiments. 
 

An experiment would require a hypothesis, planning, and execution over a period of time, while attempting to create some sort of a laboratory environment, where all other variables remain as a constant. An extremely painful and meticulous task to do in a marketing environment where change is the only constant.

Common methods of conducting such experiments were a/b testing, or GeoLift experiments

• A/B testing typically meant splitting an audience of users to two parts, and running a 2-4 weeks test, showing part of the users Ads, and the other, Ghost Ads, or PSAs.
  The idea behind such a test, was to create a test and control group, allowing you as an Advertiser to measure if the users exposed to ads perform more than the control group.
   
• GeoLift experiments typically meant holding out (i.e. stopping) advertising on a channel in a region or country, for a period of 3-5 weeks, comparing the results of the regions where Advertising was “on” vs. the results of the region where Advertising was turned off.
   

In theory, both of these methods made sense for measurement, however, both contained several constraints and flaws: 

• Advertisers need to spend time and attention conducting such tests
• Results were often inconclusive given the fact that an Advertiser cannot control all variables: Competition, Weather, Seasonality effects, External compounding factors, etc.
• Both methodologies required access to user level data (location, targeting). Access to user level data is fading away given privacy changes.
• Stopping advertising for the sake of measuring advertising feels absurd

The only benefit these methodologies had been that they were tangible, and easy to explain in layman terms. 
 

Time Machine Measurements (Back to the Future)

INCRMNTAL’s approach to measurement is unique and innovative, as it does not rely on planned experiments. It does rely on thousands of micro-experiments. 
(got you confused?)

When researching the INCRMNTAL unique methodology of measurement, we interviewed dozens of Advertisers. An interesting observation we found in all of our interviews confirmed an assumption we had: 

Advertisers make a LOT of changes every single day within their normal operations
(don’t take our word. Check your own Google Ads or Facebook Ads change logs)

An average day for a marketer starts by checking reporting data, and goes on to conducting changes in campaigns: 

• Increasing / decreasing bids
• Setting up new creatives
• Turning off saturated creatives
• Scaling up campaigns
• Scaling down campaigns
• Optimizing targeting
• Optimizing placements
• Testing new channels
• And more…

Changes ARE Experiments. Maybe they are small experiments, or what we refer to as Micro-Experiments, but accumulating many of these micro-experiments allowed us to treat those as a steady flow of interruptions creating an enormous pool of opportunity to measure the impact and compounding effect of each and every interruption over conversions, revenues, sales, sign ups or whatever it is an Advertiser wants to be measuring.
Even if it is in the past. 
 

Measuring Causality by Leveraging Micro Experiments 

INCRMNTAL tracks every and all marketing changes an Advertiser made. When logging in to the dashboard, a marketer will see a timeline of each of the changes they did across their advertising channels.

Each of these activities is measurable , even if the activities happened weeks, months, or years ago.

We will not use this article to explain the full methodology of our measurements, if you want to check that – feel free to read this awesome article explaining our methodology with the help of Pizza.

What we wanted this article to focus on is the fact that INCRMNTAL is the only incrementality measurement platform that allows you to measure the incrementality of past decisions. 
This fact is also why and how Advertisers often validate that INCRMNTAL’s measurements are accurate – by measuring the results of something where you know the answer, marketers can build the trust they need in the platform.

Read the success story about how Self Financial challenged, validated, and built trust in the INCRMNTAL platform in order to revolutionize their marketing results.