Offline measurement is a crucial part of calculating the marketing ROI of your programmatic campaigns. One way to measure whether or not your ads influenced consumers, and drove actions like visiting a brick and mortar location, is through incrementality.
What is Incrementality
Incrementality gives you insight into whether your ads impact signups or purchases by using a test vs. control format. This allows you to compare results from a group of people who were shown an ad, and a comparable control group that did not see the ad.
Incrementality testing provides a picture of how your customers were acquired—either as a result of the ad, or independent of the ad. With incrementality, you can understand if and how consumers were influenced by your programmatic campaign, and then segment those consumers accordingly.
The Benefits of Incrementality
Understand how each of your programmatic channels is affecting consumers.
Incrementality is all about identifying what interaction influences a consumer to engage with your brand or perform a desired action, like visiting a brick and mortar store. By measuring incrementality, you’re able to get granular insights that tell you which channels are having the most influence on your desired consumers.
Segment consumers based on incremental results.
When you measure incrementality you’re able to see how your campaign is impacting each consumer. Use those insights to segment audiences based on their incremental visits.
For example, you might segment consumers based on their response to your messaging. If a consumer engaged with your brand after seeing an ad, you can segment them from those who did not.
Adjust your media spend according to incrementality insights.
By measuring incrementality, you can see which audience segments should receive increased spend and which should not. Optimizing your budget through incrementality will enable you to use your media spend in the most effective way possible.
How to Measure Incrementality
The best way to measure the incrementality of your media is to leverage testing and experimentation. To start, audiences are typically segmented randomly into test and control groups, assigned to different media channels. Conversion rates are calculated for each group, and then the difference in those rates will highlight the incremental contribution of each channel.
The above example of measuring incrementality is a simple one, but it’s possible to run more complex and granular tests, too. Incorporating data from various sources can help you better understand the incremental contribution of each of your channels. And ultimately, this will enable you to adjust and optimize your campaigns for increased performance.
Offline Measurement Incrementality
Offline measurement of incrementality is a crucial part of measuring whether or not your ads have influenced consumers, and driven actions like visiting a brick and mortar location.
StackAdapt is partnered with various attribution partners, such as Cuebiq, who have their own proprietary and state-of-the-art methodology to calculate incrementality. Cuebiq’s incrementality methodology provides a powerful measurement tool so you can understand how and where your dollars are increasing footfall to your stores.
Even better, it provides incrementality insights at a granular level. This allows you to understand if your campaign is driving in loyal or casual customers, how well the campaign performed for each of them, and a breakdown of campaign effects by sociodemographic cut.
Incrementality and Native Ads
Historically, native advertising has been viewed as a mid-funnel strategy. This is because when measuring if your ads are driving bottom-funnel activity, marketers have to account for an element of human behaviour, it’s not as simple as looking at click-through rates.
The impact your native ads have on bottom-funnel metrics is a measurement all marketers want, and with an innovative concept known as “incrementality”, you’ll be able to deliver those metrics.
Creative Incrementality With StackAdapt
Incrementality testing can lead to better decisions by marketers when it comes to their media investments. The results of creative incrementality help to identify which tactics were most effective. When you can tie business results to your native ads, you’re able to optimize your budget by allocating ad spend to have the most impact.
With native advertising playing a large role in driving users to blogs and other content experiences, measuring ROI of your campaigns through bottom-funnel metrics is an effective way to validate both your content marketing strategy and native advertising efforts.
With StackAdapt, you can start incrementality testing in 3 simple steps:
- Upload your creatives.
- Set one as a control.
- Determine the percentage of the audience you want to serve each ad to.
Once your Creative Incrementality campaigns are live, dashboard reports provide the performance metrics for each ad creative!
With all the insights you’ll gain from using creative incrementality in StackAdapt, you’ll be able to answer the question that all marketers are asking “Does your ad spend actually result in new customers?”
Want to get started with measuring incrementality? Request a demo to learn more about StackAdapt.
