Maximising your marketing measurement: why incrementality should be your North Star

Successful marketing relies on rigorous measurement practices and data-driven decisions but, as consumer behaviours evolve and ad formats become more diverse and immersive, measuring every aspect of your campaign’s performance becomes a challenge.

Here, Peter Simpson, a Marketing Science Partner at Meta, talks to EGR about maximising marketing measurement strategy and why incrementality should be the North Star for marketers.

EGR: Peter, why are advertisers increasingly struggling to understand the impact of their ads?

Peter Simpson (PS): Businesses that are experiencing the most difficulty in understanding the impact of their ads are those relying on click-based measurement tools. Consumers are increasingly engaging with formats like video that don’t necessarily lead to clicks; Gen Z users, for example, are twice as likely to make a purchase without clicking than other generations.

Advertisers that successfully capture a fuller picture of performance, however, are moving beyond a single source of truth to a mix of trusted tools and methods. This ‘suite of truth’ often includes attribution, marketing mix modelling (MMM) and experiments. It’s the new best practice when it comes to marketing measurement.

EGR: We’ve heard a lot recently about incrementality within measurement. What is it, and how does it fit into this ‘suite of truth’ approach?

PS: Incrementality is the true measure of your ad’s impact, and it should be the North Star for any marketer looking to optimise their strategy. Incrementality lies at the heart of the ‘suite of truth’ approach – the measure of the additional value resulting from your ads, beyond what would have happened without them – which is the gold standard of measurement.

Grounding a suite of truth in incrementality ensures that each method and metric is in service of a singular purpose: to drive actionable insights into incremental performance. Incrementality is so valuable because it provides a direct link between media activities and outcomes, ensuring you can clearly understand the value each channel is driving. This allows you to maximise returns and create a transparent system that credits each channel and activation with the results it generates.

The ‘ladder of incrementality’ is a helpful tool to consult when considering your choices. The higher up the ladder the technique, the more effective it is in measuring true incrementality.

EGR: You mentioned that those struggling the most were relying on click-based measurement tools like last-click attribution. Why is it important to move away from these solutions?

PS: To align your business to incrementality, it’s important to understand the limitations of last-click attribution, which gives all credit for a conversion to the final marketing touchpoint, leaving out the contribution of all other channels a consumer may have interacted with previously.

While last-click attribution is the default source of truth for many gaming advertisers, it can over-index on bottom-funnel activities like search. Making investment decisions based on last-click risks overlooking the full range of channels that are driving value. In fact, 31% of incremental conversions on Meta technologies are misallocated to other channels based on non-incremental attribution models. (Source: Meta, 307 studies run by 54 advertisers between March 2022 and November 2024 across North America, EMEA, APAC and Latam.)

If last-click attribution is fuelling your investment decisions right now, a good first step is to move to an attribution model that incorporates additional touchpoints (such as views and additional clicks in the funnel) or exploring statistical methods. What’s more, calibrating that model – adjusting and refining your model so it more accurately reflects real-world outcomes – can help you to understand if adding new touchpoints will help you reach incrementality, or if a larger shift may be needed.

EGR: Can you give an example of calibration in action?

PS: Product Madness, a market-leading free-to-play social casino business, recently went through its own calibration journey. Like many app advertisers, it faced hurdles in accurately measuring the impact of its campaigns amid changes in privacy regulations and wanted to understand if its ads on Meta technologies were driving results. The business also wanted to quantify the gap between its current attribution model results and its ads’ true value – and build a more accurate, holistic measurement infrastructure.

In partnership with the marketing science team at Meta, Product Madness ran conversion lift tests across its games. It ran 10 single-cell conversion lift studies each quarter, across both iOS and Android ads. Based on the results, the firm was able to improve performance reporting accuracy across campaigns for five game titles, including a 3x improvement for Android campaigns, and a 5x improvement for iOS campaigns.

EGR: What are three key actions marketers can take today to optimise their marketing measurement?

PS: While the path toward incrementality can take time, here’s what you can do immediately:

1. Review your current practices. Start with an assessment of data quality and coverage, as well as methodology improvements, such as moving from last-click attribution to models that include additional touchpoints.
2. Calibrate measurement models. Approaches such as multi-touch attribution (MTA) or MMM should be calibrated with the results of experiments to accurately reflect real-world outcomes.
3. Conduct regular experiments. Do this as frequently as possible across as many channels as possible. Experiments are particularly effective for single channel evaluations and in-channel optimisation. Businesses that conduct 15 or more experiments annually achieve 30% higher ad performance compared to those that run none.

EGR: Where can marketers learn more about moving their measurement strategy towards the North Star of incrementality?

PS: You can read more in our article, Measurement 360: Building a ‘suite of truth’ to capture the incremental impact of advertising

Peter Simpson is a marketing science partner at Meta, working with clients across the RMG vertical. He specialises in data-driven marketing strategies, measurement and analytics.

With a passion for incrementality, Simpson helps brands optimise their performance and drive growth through innovative solutions, collaboration and a deep understanding of digital marketing.