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Performance

Incrementality

Also known as: incremental lift · causal measurement

Definition

Incrementality is the additional revenue an ad genuinely caused, as opposed to revenue that would have occurred anyway. It is measured by withholding advertising from a comparable group.

Attribution answers 'which touchpoint gets credit'. Incrementality answers the only question that matters commercially: 'would this sale have happened without the ad'. Branded search and retargeting are the classic offenders — both report excellent ROAS while largely intercepting demand that already existed.

The practical test is a geo holdout: suspend spend in one comparable region, hold another constant, and compare revenue over a fixed window. It is the closest thing to a controlled experiment available to most marketing teams, and it routinely changes budget allocation more than a year of dashboard analysis.

More in Performance

Attribution window

An attribution window is the period after an ad interaction during which a resulting conversion is credited to that ad — commonly 1, 7 or 28 days for clicks and 1 day for views.

CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost)

CAC is the total sales and marketing cost required to acquire one new paying customer over a given period, including media spend, agency fees, tooling and salaries.

Cohort analysis

Cohort analysis groups customers by a shared starting characteristic — usually acquisition month — and tracks their behaviour over time, revealing retention and value patterns that blended averages hide.

Consent mode

Consent mode is a mechanism that adjusts how analytics and advertising tags behave based on a user's consent choices, allowing modelled measurement when tracking consent is withheld.

Contribution margin

Contribution margin is revenue minus all variable costs — cost of goods, shipping, payment fees, returns and marketing — showing what each sale actually contributes toward fixed costs and profit.

Conversion rate

Conversion rate is the percentage of visitors or sessions that complete a defined action — a purchase, form submission or booking — within a measurement period.

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