A 6x return on ad spend looks great in a dashboard. It says nothing about whether those customers would have bought anyway. Branded search and retargeting are the usual suspects.
What incrementality means
Incremental revenue is revenue that exists only because the ad ran. To find it you need a group that did not see the ad, and the patience to compare.
Three tests any account can run
- Pause branded search in one region for two weeks
- Hold out ten percent of your retargeting audience
- Run a geo split on your largest prospecting campaign
The results are often uncomfortable. We have seen retargeting campaigns reporting 9x that added almost nothing, and prospecting campaigns reporting 1.8x that drove most of the growth.
What to do with the answer
Move budget toward the campaigns that create demand, and judge the account on blended revenue rather than platform-reported return.
