In the dynamic world of marketing, knowing the incremental impact of your efforts is essential. While many metrics give you a glimpse into your impact, the real power lies in understanding incrementality—knowing exactly what happens because of your marketing, and what would not have happened otherwise. This year we have rolled out major updates to our incrementality experiments to make it easier for all advertisers to measure the true, causal impact of your ads.
You’ve told us that proving the real-world value of your marketing is your top priority. 80% of US senior marketing analytics professionals reported that implementing insights from incremental experiments have a high impact on revenue growth.1 That is why we have made significant updates to make these experiments more accessible, helping you transform your budgets with ROI clarity into a precise engine for growth.
Making incrementality accessible and impactful
We're committed to making incrementality easier to implement, more robust, and deeply integrated into your overall measurement strategy. This year we rolled out a few major advancements to the scale, accuracy, and actionability of advertisers run incrementality experiments. We're improving the access for advanced incrementality testing, ensuring that marketers of all sizes can confidently measure their impact:
- Breaking down barriers with lower spend thresholds: Historically, incrementality experiments could be a significant investment. We’re changing that by lowering the minimum spend required to run these powerful tests. What once might have cost upwards of $100,000 for a single experiment can now be done for $5,000. This opens the door for many more businesses to embrace incrementality testing, proving the value of every marketing dollar. Furthermore, we have launched updates to your study setting around feasibility and conversion actions that gives you granular control over what you measure.
- More conclusive results with improved methodology: We’re constantly refining the science behind our incrementality experiments. Through advancements in methodology, including sophisticated statistical models, we’re providing more transparent and conclusive results more often—in fact, up to 50% more frequently! This means you’ll get clearer, more reliable insights into your campaigns’ true impact, helping you make decisions with greater certainty.
- Empowering action with speedier reporting: Beyond just delivering powerful results, we’re making those insights more actionable. We’re improving reporting speed and data offerings, allowing for deeper dives and more nuanced analysis. For example, we will be enabling you to choose your custom test size and see your results, externally available in the UI, at your preferred level of statistical confidence. This enables quicker identification of what's working, helping you optimize campaigns and foster data-driven conversations, even when the initial lift might appear subtle. It’s about giving you the insights you need, faster, to continually refine your strategies.
The full picture: Incrementality, MMMs, and Attribution together
Incrementality is a powerful component of a comprehensive measurement toolkit. By thoughtfully combining incrementality experiments, Marketing Mix Models (MMMs), and Attribution, you can achieve a holistic, agile, and durable view of your marketing performance:
- MMMs provide a holistic overview of all media channels, sales, and external factors that impact sales (e.g. seasonality, pricing, economy).
- Incrementality offers the precise, causal data for specific campaigns and channels.
- Attribution maps the customer journey, identifying key touchpoints and assigning credit
This integrated approach allows you to calibrate and refine your MMMs with real-world experimental data, enhancing their accuracy. These new, more accessible incrementality studies can help you calibrate your other models and help you get a more confident view of what's truly driving your campaign results and business growth.
Posted by John Chen, Senior Director, Product Management, Ads Measurement
1. Google/BCG, Global Measurement Survey, US, n=567 senior marketing analytics professionals with an annual ad spend of >$500k. Fielded Jan 27-Feb 15, 2025