Analytics
What is Incrementality?
The sales a marketing activity created that would not have happened without it. It is the number that matters for budget decisions, and it is almost always smaller than the number the platform reports.
Why it matters in practice
Attribution answers who to credit, incrementality answers what changed. They come apart most sharply on branded search and retargeting, where the buyer had already decided and the ad simply appeared on the path to a purchase that was coming anyway. The way to find out is to stop, not to argue about the report: hold spend back in one region or for one set of products, keep everything else steady, then compare total sales against a comparable region where nothing changed. If total sales hold up without the spend, the reported sales were being reassigned rather than created. If they drop, the spend was doing real work and you now know roughly how much.
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