From accountability to incrementality: How can better measurement help businesses grow?

Minh Nguyen

Search engine Google redefined the way it measures advertising to focus on incrementality and demonstrated how it can be used to remove the potential biases found in long-accepted methodologies.

Abstract

In this paper, we redefine advertising measurement as incrementality and demonstrate how we measure it at Google whilst providing some examples. Advertising measurement has long been used purely to provide accountability: to prove that advertising works. However, measurement should preferably focus on incrementality: helping businesses grow with advertising. To measure incrementality, i.e. the true effectiveness of advertising, we have to move away from long-accepted methodologies: pre vs. post-campaign or non-exposed vs. exposed. We provide a step-by-step methodology to remove the potential biases behind those methodologies by using propensity score matching and weighting techniques. Another example of measuring true incrementality...

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