Boris Beceric

If you aren’t testing for incrementality, you’re likely paying for customers who were going to buy from you anyway. ROAS is often a “real-time gauge” that reflects correlation – it tells you what happened, but it doesn’t prove your ads caused it. To find that truth, you need to shift your marketing culture from assumed credit to causal proof. As Gaurav Bhaya (VP of Ads & Analytics at Google) and Patrick Gilbert (CEO at @adventureppcinc) emphasize, you need to upgrade your technology to move beyond defensive reporting and start reporting offensively. Testing turns marketing costs into growth investments. Calibrate your data to invest with data-backed confidence. Here’s how: ⚙️ Move beyond the real-time gauges: Attribution tells you what’s happening now, but causal gauges like incrementality help you understand the why behind your performance. ⚖️ Calibrate for reality: Use incrementality as your ground truth to calibrate all your other gauges, ensuring your budget reflects actual causality rather than just data points. ❤️‍ 🩹Avoid emotional budgeting: Don’t cut budgets based on short-term anxieties; let a proper time horizon of data prove the effectiveness of your brand investments. 🧪 Lead with a true hypothesis: Define exactly what you expect to happen – like a lift in brand search – before you launch. 💎 Run ongoing experiments: Running a high volume of experiments per year is how you prove marketing is a growth driver. By calibrating your models with incrementality, you stop guessing at ROI and start investing with mathematical certainty. How often is your team running incrementality tests?