Incrementality

What is Incrementality?

Branded search and retargeting show the problem clearly in health: a telehealth brand whose branded campaign reports 8× ROAS is largely harvesting patients who searched the brand after an ad, an email, or a friend’s recommendation, and only a holdout reveals how many would have converted anyway. The practical test is a geo split: pause the campaign in matched markets, compare new-patient volume against the exposed markets, and let the gap (not the platform’s attribution) set the budget. A quick over-claim check: when platform-attributed revenue summed across channels exceeds what the bank account shows, at least one platform is taking credit for conversions it did not cause, which is why incrementality reads best alongside MER.

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