Incrementality
01 Definition
Incrementality meaning: Incrementality is the extra results a marketing activity causes that would not have happened otherwise.
Incrementality measures the additional conversions, revenue, or actions truly caused by a marketing effort, beyond what would have occurred without it. It separates real influence from activity that would have happened anyway, and it is usually estimated through controlled experiments rather than attribution models.
Why it matters
How Incrementality fits the work
Incrementality answers whether spending actually changes outcomes, protecting budgets from crediting sales that customers would have made regardless.
In context
A holdout test showed that only 40 of 100 attributed sales were incremental, meaning the rest would have happened without the ads.
Practical note
Standard attribution reports cannot prove incrementality because they only track credited paths; measuring true lift requires a control group that saw no ads.