The Only Thing That Matters: Incrementality
Let’s just say it: Most digital marketing metrics are bullshit.
Impressions? Clicks? Views? Cute.
They look great in a deck and make everyone feel productive, but when it comes to answering the only question that actually matters, "Did this move the needle?" those metrics are basically confetti in a hurricane.
Enter the hero we don’t talk about enough: Incrementality.
As my very smart colleague Steve Hoechster recently said (in between bites of metaphorical marketing truth), “The only thing that matters is incrementality. How much better did you do in terms of revenue creation, customer acquisition, whatever… versus if you didn’t do it.”
Boom.
Not how many eyeballs you got. Not how many likes or shares or CTRs you squeezed out of a budget. It’s the delta. The change. The lift.
This is the great reckoning happening in digital marketing right now. People are realizing that most of what we’ve been measuring is easy to game and impossible to prove. It makes agencies look good and CMOs feel safe, but it’s not the truth. The truth is incrementality, and it’s a bitch to measure.
But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.
Because here’s the deal: If your campaign, ad, influencer stunt, skywritten QR code or TikTok dance challenge isn’t measurably better than doing nothing at all, then what the hell are we doing here?
Let’s break this down further.
What Is Incrementality, Really?
Incrementality is the holy grail metric: it tells you what portion of your results came because of your marketing, not just what happened during it.
Think of it like this: If you ran a $50,000 campaign and brought in $200,000 in revenue, you might think you crushed it. But if you would've brought in $180,000 without doing a damn thing, you only made an extra $20,000. And that means your actual lift was 10%, not 300%.
That 10% is your incrementality. That’s what matters.
Why Don’t More Marketers Measure It?
Because it’s hard. It requires control groups. It demands real experiments. You have to be comfortable with not running a campaign in some markets or for some segments just to see what would've happened without it.
It’s not sexy. It doesn’t look great in a quarterly review. It’s science, not sizzle.
And that’s why it’s the most honest metric in the game.
Performance Marketing Needs This More Than Anyone
If you're in performance marketing, this isn’t optional anymore. It’s your job. Incrementality is how you prove your worth. It's the difference between being a tactical line item and being a revenue-driving machine.
The problem is too many teams are over-investing in performance tactics that aren't pulling their weight. Or worse, they're cannibalizing results from organic or unpaid channels and claiming it as success. Without incrementality as your north star, you're just throwing money into a blender and calling it a smoothie.
What About Word of Mouth?
Now, let’s be real. Word of mouth doesn’t lend itself to incrementality measurement the same way performance does.
It's messy. It spills across channels. It happens in backchannels and text threads and Reddit posts your team isn’t tracking.
But that doesn’t mean you ignore it. If you're tracking outcomes like sales, signups, and revenue, and you isolate WOM from other marketing efforts, you can start to get a feel for how it moves the top line.
And here’s the kicker: In many cases, WOM is more cost-effective than traditional paid tactics.
It doesn't require endless budget increases. It compounds. And it builds something performance never will: trust.
So if you're serious about growing top-line revenue, which, let’s face it, is the only thing that matters to anyone writing checks, then your job is to figure out which tactics actually drive it. Word of mouth, paid media, brand stunts, influencer plays, SEO... it all goes in the blender.
But incrementality tells you which ingredients are actually doing the work.
How Do You Get Started?
Isolate your variable. Pick one tactic, one channel, or one audience. Don’t try to boil the ocean.
Run A/B or holdout tests. Serve ads to some people. Hold back from others. Compare outcomes.
Measure actual business impact. Sales. Signups. Revenue. Not impressions. Not engagement. Real outcomes.
Repeat and refine. This is about building muscle, not getting a six-pack overnight.
The Incrementality Mindset
It’s not just a metric. It’s a mindset. It’s about questioning everything:
Would this have happened without us?
Are we adding value, or just making noise?
Are we chasing vanity, or creating value?
Marketers need to get a little more paranoid in a good way. Paranoid that their work might not actually be doing anything. Because once you start thinking like that, you stop wasting money. You stop overestimating impact. You stop making excuses.
And you start doing marketing that matters.
Yes, attribution is messy. Yes, word-of-mouth is notoriously slippery to quantify. But the answer isn’t to retreat into the warm blanket of engagement metrics. It’s to reconfigure our thinking.
We start with a simple premise: Every marketing dollar should earn its keep.
That doesn’t mean everything gets a perfect ROI spreadsheet. It means we shift our obsession from outputs to outcomes. From the illusion of activity to the reality of impact.
If you're not measuring incrementality, you're measuring irrelevance.
So let’s kill the vanity metrics, embrace the hard stuff, and start doing marketing that matters.
Because "better than nothing" shouldn’t be an insult. It should be the bar.