Terms of Trade · Edition 1: The PE deck
Incrementality
Definition
The additional sales caused by a piece of marketing: the ones that would not have happened without it. Measured by a controlled experiment or another credible causal design, a holdout audience, a geo test, a matched market, rather than inferred from an advertising platform’s attribution model. It is the measure that answers the question a board is actually asking, and the one least often run, because the answer is frequently smaller than the channel’s own report.
Field note
Incrementality is the one number that would settle the attribution argument, which is why nobody in the argument proposes measuring it.
Board question
Which of our channels has been through a holdout test, and what share of its attributed revenue survived?
Applied through
Attribution, the entry before this one, is the problem it solves; Commercial Discipline in the Cat’s Whiskers is where the answer lands.
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