Digital Marketing Effectiveness Using Incrementality

Digital marketing is one of the fastest-growing advertising channels and crossed the $330 billion mark in 2019. With exponentially increasing budgets, measuring the impact of marketing investments and driving effectiveness becomes essential for brands. The complexity of the digital ad-tech ecosystem is constantly evolving with brands running marketing activities across multiple channels, new targeting capabilities, and different formats. Due to this intricacy, traditional digital measurement metrics like cost per click, return on investment, cost per conversion, etc. just scratch the surface while measuring the actual impact of marketing strategies remains unsettled. We bridged this gap in marketing measurement by using the incremental lift as a metric to measure the impact of a marketing strategy. Incrementality testing is a mathematical approach to differentiate between correlation and causation. We formulated the Viewability Lift method by applying the concepts of A/B testing which can be implemented in the digital marketing ecosystem. In this method, we measure the effectiveness of an ad by comparing the users who are exposed to an ad versus users that are not exposed to an ad. Our methodology covers concepts of test environment setup, randomization, bias handling, hypothesis testing, primary output and understanding different ways of using this output. We used this output for digital marketing strategy planning and campaign optimizations leading to improved campaign efficiency.