The Power of Incrementality testing and Geo Testing
Incrementality testing is an invaluable way to measure the true impact of marketing, revealing true campaign value and helping marketers maximize return on advertising spend (ROAS).
Incrementality measurements provide valuable contextual insight, helping your business develop a more streamlined strategy.
It’s a data-driven approach
Incrementality testing is a powerful method for understanding the real-world impact of marketing actions on sales. It provides causal insight into marketing performance while eliminating bias inherent in traditional attribution models. Incrementality testing also facilitates test-and-learn approaches that help inform budget decisions more informedly; however, extensive data collection must also take place as well as close partnership with your ad network partner to ensure accurate user tracking.
Geo incrementality experiments are vulnerable to seasonal factors that can skew results, including holidays and major events that have an outsized influence on user behavior compared to other times of the year. Therefore, conducting thorough tests, reviewing data to detect biases is necessary for optimal results.
Incrementality tests are easier than ever before to conduct. With tools like Google Ads Conversion Lift, you can quickly uncover growth opportunities and enhance your data-driven budgeting strategy. It works by calculating the difference in sales between treatment and control groups in order to measure incrementality.
This approach can be particularly helpful when measuring top-of-the-funnel campaigns that are hard to measure in terms of direct ROI. Furthermore, this strategy can assist with optimizing re-engagement strategies so your advertising spend is being utilized efficiently as well as understanding how best to scale marketing efforts across specific media channels. However, when taking this route be wary of changing privacy laws that might impede how user data is used.
It’s privacy-compliant
Geo-matched tests allow marketers to demonstrate the incrementality of their campaigns, helping them understand their efforts’ true impact without being clouded by noise and external factors such as seasonality or media mentions that can obscure attribution models. Geo-tests also serve as ground truth for other measurement approaches such as marketing mix modeling.
Geo testing is an invaluable asset to marketers seeking to optimize budget allocation and make informed marketing decisions. Geo testing enables marketers to select the ideal channel, message and timing for re-engagement while simultaneously identifying any gaps in their strategy and uncover underperforming channels requiring adjustments.
Geo testing stands out from its competition because its methodology relies on cohort-level data, making it adaptable even when user tracking restrictions such as those introduced in iOS 17 are in effect. Furthermore, Geo testing has become an indispensable tool for app marketers as well as any marketer using hard-to-measure channels like TV and OTT media platforms. To fully leverage geo-testing’s potential, it’s essential to plan and execute tests frequently. Doing this will ensure you make the most out of your budget allocation and growth objectives. Start here to get your geo-testing off the ground: download Meta’s geo-testing solution which features videos and slides covering its methodology, an illustration on how to design an experiment, as well as an example case study from one brand who used Geo-Testing to demonstrate scale potential of YouTube prospecting.
It’s strategic
Geo-testing is an invaluable marketing tool that allows marketers to measure incremental lift in a privacy-safe way. To do this, divide your target audience into two groups; show one group your ad while withholding from another; compare results then determine incremental lift. It’s much faster and requires much less data compared to attribution but requires familiarizing oneself with best practices to avoid potential pitfalls.
Along with choosing an area for testing, it’s also crucial to find the optimal size of geos used for experimentation. Too small could allow users to move among them and potentially contaminate the results while too large might prove costly and less than precise insights.
Finally, selecting an effective analysis method to measure incrementality is key to producing accurate and reliable results. This may involve randomization, stratification or systematic sampling; each of these options should be free from bias to produce reliable outcomes.
Match market incrementality testing, an increasingly popular technique, involves comparing performance in test markets against similar markets without marketing campaigns to measure true incremental impact. While it can be complex to implement this method effectively, its implementation can bring great insight and help pinpoint budget allocation more effectively.
It’s scalable
Incrementality testing not only reveals the true value of marketing campaigns, but can also assist marketers in more strategically allocating resources. This approach can prove particularly helpful when venturing into uncharted advertising waters such as exploring social media platforms or testing different ad networks; testing can reveal whether new investments are worthwhile and ensure they don’t waste money before realizing meaningful results.
Incrementality testing compares the performance of a targeted marketing campaign against an hypothetical similar one that doesn’t exist, in order to observe its effect on sales and conversions.
To ensure accurate statistical measurements, it is vitally important that geographic regions are defined correctly. Deliberately choosing DMAs or zip codes as research sites is ideal; however, take care not to select too small geos as people tend to cross borders often leading to cross-pollination within your test results.
Attribution models and ROI reporting can provide essential input into AI-powered ads campaigns, while incrementality testing offers a deeper, multidimensional look at each channel’s marginal contribution. This helps make informed decisions regarding your long-term marketing strategy while eliminating wasteful spend on ineffective advertisements campaigns.