Muze AIDefinition
Incrementality is the share of conversions that genuinely happened because of advertising, rather than conversions that would have occurred anyway. It is measured with holdout or geo tests, where a comparable group is deliberately not shown ads and the difference in outcomes is compared.
What to know
Attribution assigns credit; incrementality asks whether the credit was deserved. The two can disagree sharply, most often on branded search and retargeting, where platforms take credit for demand that already existed.
It is the most rigorous measurement available to most advertisers and the least used, because it requires deliberately withholding ads from part of the audience.
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