Taking Campaign Measurement to the Next Level
The digital ad space is growing more complex every day, fueled by advancements in technology, changes in consumer buying preferences, and shifts in media consumption. Digital marketers face growing pressure to identify the channels and tactics that generate the most value for a business’s bottom line. As a result, marketing efforts, including targeting and measurement techniques, have become more sophisticated in recent years. Marketers of all sizes want to know the true impact of their campaigns and are now rethinking how they can best evaluate them.
The industry is evolving from a conversion performance focus to a more objective measure of incremental lift. Traditional performance metrics like clicks and impressions are losing their luster, but higher-value metrics like revenue and net profit are difficult to obtain. While traditional metrics only scratch the surface, incrementality goes deeper. What exactly is incrementality and how is it measured?
The Incrementality Mentality
With media budgets growing and advertisers experimenting with different channels and formats, understanding the true impact of your marketing efforts is crucial in making budgeting decisions and justifying scale. Most marketers would (understandably) only want to spend money on channels that drive results and ensure a positive brand experience.
While an increasing share of the industry is looking to move away from last-touch attribution, the majority of marketers still depend on it due to its ease-of-use. While last-touch is a simple way to assign credit, it’s not the most accurate. Incrementality strives to identify the causal event of a conversion, allowing businesses to properly allocate budget and reduce wasted ad spend. Incrementality measures the lift in desired outcome that a specific channel brings in the campaign results above native demand—the increase in leads, sales, and other key performance indicators (KPIs) gained that would not have occurred without certain marketing efforts.
Incrementality isn’t about assigning credit to a conversion; it’s about identifying the interaction that moves a user from passive to active. Whichever interaction influences an actual outcome is identified as incremental. Incrementality is a way to measure an event that wouldn’t have occurred without a specific interaction, such as an ad view, and that resulted in the desired outcome, such as a conversion. By testing different influencing factors, advertisers can gain true insight into the value of their ad dollars.
Incrementality helps answer key questions, including:
- Which ad creative is the key contributor to an advertiser’s intended outcome?
- What happens if an advertiser increases or decreases budget on certain publishers?
- Which audience segments had the strongest response to an ad?
- Most importantly: are ads driving actual value, or just claiming credit for an action that would have occurred naturally?
Digital Remedy Approach: Measuring and Isolating the Impact of OTT
In recent years, there has been an influx of innovation in the OTT/streaming space. As the industry continuously evolves, so do our capabilities. When Digital Remedy launched our Flip OTT solution in 2019, the ability to track conversions on one device driven by impressions on a separate device was a new and novel concept. Flip was developed to provide answers to any question that a sophisticated, data-driven advertiser could possibly have—via personalized recommendations, multi-methodology attribution, best-in-class optimization, and in-depth campaign insights.
Today, attribution has become the standard and is now expected from media partners. We believe that attribution is a means to an end—a stepping stone to a reliable medium that truly works and delivers the results and positive ROI that advertisers and agencies seek. However, attribution is no longer enough. Advertisers are looking for more. There is a new barometer for measuring campaign success. That’s why our team is bringing incrementality to OTT. Incrementality solves the important question: of everyone who converted, how many converted because of an OTT exposure? Incrementality allows brands to isolate the effect of a particular media type in order to accurately measure its impact.
Interested in learning more about incrementality? Check out our full insights report or schedule a custom Flip demo.