Insights

Why Incrementality? Put Your Money Where Your Growth Is.

By Cuebiq Marketing Team / 5 minutes

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Cuebiq’s incrementality methodology provides a powerful measurement tool so you can understand how and where your dollars are increasing footfall to your stores. Even better, it allows you to understand if your campaign is driving in loyal or casual customers, how well the campaign performed for each of them, and a breakdown of campaign effects by sociodemographic cut. Did we mention retargeting?

When it comes to advertising to increase footfall, few questions are as important as: Are my campaign dollars increasing visits to my store? And if so, how many additional visits am I looking at, and from whom? A good response to these questions unlocks the power for marketers and agencies to understand how budget is really moving the needle in terms of additional visits. 

A Small Pizza Shop in Brooklyn

Picture this: you own a small pizza shop in Brooklyn called Rocco’s Pizza. One day, you are standing outside handing out flyers for a 2-for-1 promotion (buy one slice, get one free!). How would you measure the effectiveness of your campaign? In other words, how would you know which customers who saw the flyer would have gotten a slice anyway, and which ones were convinced by your promotion?

Measuring The Flyer Campaign

The answer is tricky, and science provides good guidance: you’d compare the exposed group (people who saw the flyer) with a similar, unexposed group (people who look like the exposed but didn’t see the flyer), and then check on average the difference in visits for these two groups.

However, wouldn’t it be better to compare the behavior of people who saw your flyer with themselves, instead of with other people that are similar, but not exactly, like them? Well, this is obviously physically impossible, since a single person cannot be both exposed and unexposed to your campaign. 

With the help of machine learning, it is possible. Cuebiq’s solution to measure incremental visits leverages the power of statistics to generate an artificial version of the devices in the exposed group (called a counterfactual) after learning how exposed and control devices behave. If we look at everyone who received a flyer at Rocco’s Pizza and analyze the behavior of exposed and control devices, we can calculate incremental visits. For this example, our methodology determined that the flyer campaign at Rocco’s Pizza directly contributed to a 15% increase in visits to its pizza shop compared with the visits that would have happened without the flyer campaign. Cuebiq’s incrementality solution goes beyond simply comparing exposed and control groups, allowing you to measure incremental visits by comparing each exposed customer with themself –had they not been exposed! Pretty powerful stuff.

Device-level Insights: A Door to Your Customers Behavior.

One particularly unique and highly useful feature of our methodology (which separates us from our competitors) is our ability to calculate incrementality for the entire campaign as a sum of device-level incrementalities. For example, in a simple campaign with 3 devices, device 1 shows an incrementality score of 0.7 incremental visits, device 2 has a score of 0.5, and device 3 a score of 0. Then, for the entire campaign we simply take all individual scores and add them, so that this campaign would yield 0.7+0.5+0 = 1.2 incremental visits. Our solution therefore provides a campaign-level metric as a sum of individual metrics.

Now, this unique feature of our methodology opens up incredible possibilities for further dissecting your campaign results: think about the kind of insights you can get when you know additional features about a device, like how often a device usually visits your store, or its socio-demographic features. This helps to understand if your campaign is moving the needle with customers that are regulars to your business,  or if it is increasing visits among people who would not otherwise usually go. Knowing whether your message resonated with loyal or casual customers, or with a specific socio-demographic group means retargeting now becomes a data-driven procedure!

Different campaigns have different goals. Some of your campaigns will be focused on attracting new customers, while other campaigns will be geared towards rewarding loyal customers. Our methodology allows you to know which group your campaign is resonating with most and exactly how it is driving additional visits. This provides you with the flexibility to utilize that information to assess your current campaign and optimize your next campaigns by targeting the specific group of people you need.

 

These detailed analyses are only possible with Cuebiq’s solution, and they provide a valuable starting point for the optimization of future campaigns. By generating customer segments from the behavioral analysis you can use it as a starting point to retarget future campaigns. 

How powerful is that?

Want to learn more about incrementality and how it can work for you? Book a demo with one of our specialists, or dive deeper into the methodology with our white paper on incrementality.

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About the Author

Cuebiq Marketing Team

The Cuebiq Marketing team is a group of data-driven marketers with a focus on strategy and a flair for the creative! Our team is broken down into Growth and Product Marketing departments, and we work on everything from running the Cuebiq website, to developing thought leadership content, to sales enablement and pipeline generation.