Incrementality

Incrementality is basically the marketing world’s version of asking, "But what have you done for me lately?" It measures the true impact of your campaign by determining if those sales would still have happened without your snazzy ads—because buying a moose mug might be vintage chic, but imagine if nobody needed your marketing to make that choice. It's the ultimate reality check to see if your marketing was genuinely worth the budget or just an over-glorified pat on your own back.

Incrementality in marketing refers to the measurement of the additional impact or lift that a specific advertising or marketing campaign has on a desired outcome, such as sales or customer acquisition, above what would have occurred without the intervention. It is a critical metric to determine the true effectiveness and ROI (Return on Investment) of marketing activities, as it isolates the change attributable solely to the marketing efforts rather than other external factors or pre-existing trends. Incrementality analyses often involve controlled experiments, such as A/B testing, where a test group is exposed to the marketing stimuli and compared against a control group that is not, in order to assess the net contribution of the marketing action. Understanding incrementality helps marketers to allocate budgets more effectively and optimize their strategies for maximum impact.