Attribution and Incrementality: What Are They and How Do I Start?

2008, the greatest year for any millennial Boston sports fan, the Celtics won the NBA Championship after a 22-year drought. It took a TEAM. Now imagine if 100 percent of the credit went to team captain Paul Pierce. That would never happen. It took an entire organization, coaches, fans, and service providers. Credit was given where credit was due, across the board.

Not into basketball? Imagine spending millions on advertising across TV, radio, online, and out-of-home, but 100 percent of the success credit goes to the coupons given out at the register because the coupon was the last action before conversion. This is the equivalent of the common last-touch attribution model.

Why Incrementality Matters

Measuring the incrementality of all channels is critical. Just because paid search drives the most conversions doesn't mean you should put all your budget there. Yes, paid search performs well and is cost efficient. But what is driving people to search? Google and Facebook dominate last-touch attribution because their algorithms know when to show an ad based on how many touchpoints an individual typically needs to convert.

Moving Beyond Last-Touch

By eliminating last-touch attribution and allowing machine learning attribution to take over, you can use historical data to assign credit to each touchpoint. Instead of paid search receiving 100 percent, all channels get a percent that adds up to 100 per conversion, for example banner ads 50 percent, first site visit 10 percent, TV ad 15 percent, paid search 20 percent, final site visit 5 percent.

The Foundation You Need

The biggest challenge is that you need historical data or significant ad spend to obtain statistically significant data. You'll need a strong MarTech stack to organize first-party data. With the right technology, we can predict customer lifetime value, run lift tests against hold-out groups, understand the path to conversion, and identify the channels driving the highest incrementality and ROAS.

Our goal is to make every dollar invested into marketing and advertising count and to set you up for long-term growth.