Something happened. It wasn't your doing - and all of a sudden - you’re enjoying a massive increase of traffic.

Every KPI is getting better for you:

Users spend more time on your app
Users are spending more $$ within your app
Users are downloading your app more
And your conversion rates are through the roof
An external factor influenced your results. Maybe it’s just seasonality? Maybe it’s a global pandemic? Or maybe Trump posted a tweet with a picture of your app. 
You are not really responsible for it, but you’re getting credit.

Awesome. Right ?

You Might Be ARE Missing Out The Wave

Most marketers would be super happy to see such a spike. Traffic growing by over 300% overnight is a great thing. 

Champagne bottles are popping. People are toasting for you. You’re the rockstar.

You Are Feeding Cannibals Out Of The Palm Of Your Hand

You know that something is off.
When you look at the growth by channel, something is bugging you:

Cannibalization of marketing sounds like a fictional term. It’s not. 
It simply means that your paid marketing is attributing success where rather than being the CAUSE for this success, the paid media activities are winning attribution - or in other words - are riding your wave.

There’s no wrongdoing here by the paid media vendors. They simply enjoy the mechanics of last-touch attribution. 
More users exposed to your ads in correlation with more downloads = more attribution.

You’re A Pickle. Continue Paddling Like Crazy Or Ride The Wave ?

Seems like you have 3 options:

1. Attributing the increase to the external factor, using attribution mechanics

Unfortunately this will not work. 
The external factor will (likely?) not use a Unique Tracking URL. 
As there’s no spend associated with the external factor - allocating the increase to it is close to impossible. 

2. You could stop all paid media activities

This would allow you to attribute the growth to the external factor - but at the cost of not leveraging the increase of results. 
The fact is - the external factor helped your brand. Conversions are better because of the external factor. 
You want to enjoy both.

3. You can look for the balance between the Paid and Organic increase

An external factor can give your marketing activities a boost. Like catching a wave - you’re enjoying the forces at be and you don’t need to paddle as hard.
Better conversion rates for your paid channels give you leverage. You can cap your daily spend, or decrease your payouts, or focus only on the channels that do not have an overlap with the new wave of users you’re getting thanks to the external factor.

External Factors Are All Around. All The Time.

It doesn’t take a presidential tweet to influence your marketing results. 
As long as you’re not operating in a vacuum - your campaigns are ALWAYS influenced by external factors:

• Time of day (pre-lunch, post lunch…)
• Day of week (weekday vs. weekend…)
• Seasonality
• Competition
• Special days (holidays, for example)
• Major events (Worldcup, Olympics, US Election, Global Pandemic)
• Trends (The Queen Gambit to Chess Apps…)

And the most meta - YOUR MARKETING ACTIVITIES ARE AFFECTED BY YOUR OWN MARKETING ACTIVITIES!
Like a train, getting inertia - the more you market, the more your brand becomes known - the less you need to market to create awareness of your brand.

INCRMNTAL helps you ride the waves

If you want to find out more about how, book a demo with us today!