Incrementality is an immensely powerful tool when it comes to measuring the impact of your marketing decisions. It provides valuable insights into whether your media efforts have genuinely driven sales and units that wouldn’t have occurred without your marketing intervention.
But before diving into an incrementality study, it’s essential to consider a few key factors to determine if it’s the right fit for your campaign.
Minimizing noise in your study
Running multiple campaigns simultaneously that target the same audiences—and measure the same brands—can introduce additional outside noise into your Incrementality study, potentially skewing your results.
Incrementality offers a robust framework for uncovering the true effects of your media initiatives.
A recent study conducted by Albertsons Media Collective’s measurement science team examined 50 randomly selected campaigns across various brands from March 2023 to March 2024 to analyze the correlation between campaign configuration and incrementality performance. The findings revealed that when multiple campaigns targeting similar audiences overlap during the same period, an audience overlap effect occurs in the test and control groups, adding extraneous variables to the analysis.
For example, shoppers in your control group may have been exposed and influenced by a concurrent campaign, altering their behavior or response and impacting the analysis. If you find yourself running multiple brand campaigns simultaneously, consider consolidating them into a single incrementality study to achieve cleaner, more accurate results.
The impact of campaign duration
As with any campaign, the duration plays a crucial role in the results of your incrementality study. Among the 50 randomly selected campaigns in the above study, those running five to nine weeks reported an average lift of 13.72%, while those running 10-14 weeks saw an average lift of 14%. In contrast, campaigns with durations of less than five weeks reported an average lift of 8.11%, and those exceeding 14 weeks had an average lift of 9.55%.
It’s important to note that when running campaigns for less than five weeks, distinguishing between outside noise and the true campaign effect becomes challenging. Conversely, campaigns exceeding 14 weeks might experience a diminishing effect on shoppers, resulting in minimal to no lift toward the end of the campaign.
Timing and seasonality considerations
Campaigns with limited-time offers or tied to specific holidays may exhibit strong seasonality trends that influence lift results. For example, a Halloween-themed campaign featuring candy products might perform exceptionally well in October but could experience a decline in sales after Oct. 31, resulting in limited or no lift in your incrementality report.
This outcome doesn’t necessarily indicate poor campaign performance or the ineffectiveness of your media efforts. Instead, the outcome signifies that the lift results were heavily influenced by seasonality trends. When running incrementality on a limited-time offer or holiday campaign, you must carefully consider how you interpret the results.
Incrementality offers a robust framework for uncovering the true effects of your media initiatives. Beyond providing deeper insights into your incremental results, it empowers you to make well-informed investment decisions.
To determine if incrementality is the right choice for your campaign, consider your campaign structure, and take note of critical factors such as media noise from concurrent campaigns, your campaign’s KPIs and the campaign type. By doing so, you can harness these insights to conduct a tailored incrementality study that effectively captures the full impact your media efforts deserve.
