• DE&I Commitment
  • Careers
  • Locations
  • Book a Meeting
    Book a Meeting
  • Company
    Learn a little more about us, our values, and our team
    Our Values
    We don't just talk the talk; we live by our core values
    About Us
    Empowering brands to realize their potential with data, insights, and technology
    Leadership
    Meet our leadership team
    Secure Data Architecture
    Our promise of data security and privacy. We keep your data safe from publishers, competitors and bad actors
    Corporate Social Responsibility
    We are committed to making a positive impact on our communities and our planet
  • Platform
    Plan, manage, optimize, and measure your campaigns with our omnichannel platform
    Our Platform
    A platform that connects all walled garden media
    Connected Media
    Create and manage campaigns across search, social, retail media and apps, in one platform
    Connected Data
    Make data-driven decisions as you plan and strategize
    See the industries we serve
    Learn how our customizable solutions can help with your unique needs
    Explore our partner integrations
    See the media, retailer, and data partners we work with
  • Clients
  • News and Events
    Check out recent announcements and see what we’re up to
    News
    Check out our recent media coverage
    Events
    Join us for our next conference or webinar
    Quarterly Trends Webinar
    Get the latest insights on digital marketing campaign performance for Q4 2022
    Retail Media for Grocery Webinar
    Join us to dig into trends and challenges shaping the industry in 2023
  • Resources
    From new releases, to industry trends and best practices, Skai has you covered
    Blog
    Read the latest insights and thought leadership from our industry experts
    Capabilities
    Take your campaigns to the next level by enhancing your platform capabilities
    Research
    Explore our reports and whitepapers so you can keep up on the latest industry trends
    Subscribe
    Sign up to get the latest updates straight to your inbox
    Quarterly Trends Report
    Learn digital advertising campaign performance trends from Q3 2022
Back to Blog

Marketing Measurement Cannot Be Reliant on Individual Customer Journeys: Incrementality is the Fix

Moti Radomski, VP, Product @ Skai™

January  12, 2021

In almost every survey about marketing measurement challenges, practitioners cite so many different issues. 

Marketers report having trouble integrating data sources, often have conflicting ad marketing measurement challengesresults from different sources, and almost half (48%) say that they have difficulty measuring attribution. This survey is from 2019, but if you were to look back at 2009, 1999, or even the beginning of digital marketing, marketers have reported having trouble with measurement. 

Understanding what is and isn’t working is absolutely critical to improving marketing results, yet solid measurement still eludes us. No marketer would argue that measurement isn’t critically important, which is why marketers are willing to work with flawed systems—because even if it isn’t perfect, it’s still needed. So they work with these known issues and do the best they can with the data they have.

So, why is digital marketing measurement so flawed?

It’s because it’s been focused on tracking every marketing exposure to individuals. Although this is certainly the ideal state for marketing measurement, no marketer has ever been able to achieve 100% success with it.

Marketing measurement challenges: any approach tied to individuals is inherently flawed

Let’s face it, marketers—tracking the consumer journey is virtually impossible. 

But, somehow, most marketers have arrived at the conclusion that it is a requirement of marketing measurement. 

Let’s consider the individual customer journey tracking viability with regards to 5 different buckets:

  1. Offline paid advertising such as radio, print, television, out-of-home, etc. These exposures are extremely hard to track back to the individual.
  2. Online paid advertising such as social advertising, paid search, video ads, etc. While the easiest marketing activity to track, when consumers use different devices or clear their cookies, tracking often breaks.
  3. Offline free marketing such as word-of-mouth passed from one consumer to another. No way to track this at scale.
  4. Online free marketing such as social mentions, organic search traffic, etc. While in aggregate a marketer can track this stuff pretty well—i.e. “This post had 100 retweets”—getting user-level exposure is pretty impossible
  5. Online owned exposure such as traffic on your website or within your apps. Within these owned environments, marketers have the best individual tracking.

As you can see, only #2 and #5 have any level of individual consumer journey tracking and even those have limitations. 

So, if just a fraction of total marketing exposure can be traced back to individual journeys, then why is our marketing measurement so tied to this requirement? Yet, for most marketers, measurement based on individual customer journeys is the conclusion that they’ve come to and—no matter how flawed—the only thing that they’ll accept.

From somewhat flawed to deeply flawed: today’s marketing measurement challenges are getting worse, not better

While marketers have accepted that their marketing measurement tied to individual customer journeys is flawed, they’ve continued to believe in the viability of this measurement approach.

But, this faith is being tested.

What if I was to tell you less than 30% of the results you measure are correct? Are you still going to hold on to your customer journey-based measurement system? 

What about less than 20%?

Less than 10%?

Less than 5%? 

So, marketers. I ask you: How flawed are you willing to accept your measurement approach? 

In the last few years, consumer data privacy legislation and policies have begun to limit the tracking power of cookies and mobile IDs. Once Google finally institutes its third-party cookie limitations on Chrome in 2021, between 80-90% of all web traffic will be impacted. The coming changes to IDFA in iOS 14 will have a similar impact on all iPhone users. These changes make tracking individual users to marketing exposure at scale very fractured. 

At what point will you look for another solution? A cookieless solution? Something that can truly tell you the incremental value of your marketing efforts down to the tactic and channel levels? A solution that doesn’t rely on individual customer journeys.

It’s out there. It’s actually been used for decades. 

It was just too complex, expensive, and slow to be used at scale.

However, with new innovation in AI and machine learning, it has made this measurement approach easier, inexpensive, and fast enough to become part of the day to day marketing decision-making.

It’s called incrementality.

And if you haven’t started exploring this yet, you can bet your competitors have and may already have switched their customer journey-based tracking to incrementality in anticipation of the Chrome policy. And the added benefit of building an incrementality practice is that not only is it a complete solution for online marketing measurement, but for solving the challenge of online/offline measurement as well.

Incrementality: the only way forward to face today’s marketing measurement challenges

As marketers, there are moments where we should admit we might have gotten a little carried away. With everything that computers, the internet, big data, and machine learning have brought us, we have gotten so focused on what we can measure, that we’ve lost sight of what we actually need. 

In our pursuit of that perfect view, we’ve assumed that omniscience is the answer. If only we could track every touchpoint, every interaction, and every step in the consumer journey, we would reach Marketing Nirvana. With perfect information, no dollar would be wasted, no ad impression served in error.

But marketing is not about the ad impressions. It’s about the results.

The central question we want to answer in marketing is whether we are making an impact. Put another way, how much of the business’ sales, revenue, or profit is because of the advertising we served, and how much would have happened anyway? If we didn’t exist, would the business still be growing? Would the current sales slump be even deeper? Would our key product still be a market leader? Are our investments in TV, email, search, social, video, display, and everything else wasted?

Answering these questions doesn’t require omniscience or prayer to the ad serving gods. Incrementality is the measurement approach that enables marketers to understand how much of their business KPIs were caused by their advertising tactics, and how much would have happened even if their advertising never ran. And it can be done without cookies or user level data of any kind.

For any business outcome or KPI there are two distinct groups: the outcomes that occurred only because the business advertised its business, product, or service, and the outcomes that would have occurred because of the business’ existing reputation, brand equity, and presence in the marketplace. 

Incrementality is the experimental process, and resulting measurement, that allows a business to identify the composition of outcomes that were the direct cause of an advertising tactic, and those that would have occurred even without it as a result of other tactics or external factors.

marketing measurement

Incrementality does not try to assign credit directly to individual ad impressions or discrete outcomes. Rather it looks at the aggregate advertising activity and accumulated outcomes to understand whether there is a causal relationship and how strong that relationship is.

Skai’s incrementality platform is called Impact Navigator. For all of the power of incrementality experiments and measurement, historically, execution has been incredibly resource-intensive. Impact Navigator is a service platform that enables marketers and businesses to measure the incremental impact of advertising tactics on their on and offline business metrics. 

Impact Navigator operationalizes incrementality to enable measurement at scale, and in measuring end business outcomes, marketers’ decision making becomes driven by the same data and KPIs as the rest of the business, rather than limiting them to the attributed online outcomes previously available.

What to Do Next?

Facing marketing measurement challenges alone can be daunting without a solid technology partner. Are you interested in learning more about how Skai can help you better test, execute, and orchestrate your digital marketing efforts? 

Contact us today to set up a discussion. Time is running out. The changes to Chrome and iOS14 will be here eventually and you will want your marketing organization ready before that happens.

Get a demo of Impact Navigator

Related Posts

  • Online/Offline Marketing Measurement Isn’t As Impossible As It Once Was
    Read More
  • Life Without Multi-Touch Attribution: How Your Marketing Measurement Program Will Change Under Incrementality
    Read More
  • What’s Your Marketing Measurement Plan Against These 4 Data Deprecation Trends?
    Read More
  • Test and Learn Marketing Can Guide Your Way Through Even the Toughest Market Conditions
    Read More
  • The 4 Ingredients of a Best-in-Class Incrementality Measurement Practice
    Read More
  • Putting Incrementality Measurement Into Action: How to Figure Out What to Test
    Read More
  • Share on Facebook
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on LinkedIn
  • Share via Email
  • Copy Link
    Copied!
Tags: Apple, Data, Data & Insights, Google, Incrementality, Measure, Optimize, Plan, xTLx

Subscribe to Updates

Media that matters.
Marketing that works.
© 2023 Kenshoo, Ltd. All Rights Reserved.
Privacy Policy. Cookie Policy. Recruitment Privacy Policy.
  • Connected Data
    • Market Intelligence
    • Our Approach
    • By Need
    • By Solution
  • Connected Strategy
    • Dynamic Marketing Mix
    • Budget Forecasting
    • Strategic Consulting
  • Connected Media
    • Overview
    • Retail Media
    • Paid Search
    • Paid Social
    • App Marketing
    • Auditing
    • Expert Services
  • Measurement
    • Incrementality
    • Experiments
    • Cross-Channel Attribution
  • Resources
    • Blog
    • Glossary
    • Case Studies
    • Training & Enablement
    • Developer Hub
Privacy Preference

We use cookies on our website. Some of them are essential, while others help us to improve this website and your experience.

Privacy Preference

Save All

Save

Accept Only Essential Cookies

Manage Cookie Preferences

Cookie Details Privacy Policy Imprint

Privacy Preference

Here you will find an overview of all cookies used. You can give your consent to whole categories or display further information and select certain cookies.

Save All Save Accept Only Essential Cookies

Back

Privacy Preference

Essential cookies enable basic functions and are necessary for the proper function of the website.

Show Cookie Information Hide Cookie Information

Name
Provider Owner of this website, Imprint
Purpose Saves the visitors preferences selected in the Cookie Box of Borlabs Cookie.
Host(s) .skai.io, skai.io
Cookie Name borlabs-cookie
Cookie Expiry 1 Year
Name
Provider Owner of this website
Purpose This cookie stores selections made by the user in the Accessibe tool in order to maintain those settings on future visits. These cookies help us make our website compliant with our obligations under US law.
Privacy Policy https://accessibe.com/privacy-policy
Cookie Name acsbState, acsbReset
Cookie Expiry n/a
Name
Provider Owner of this website
Host(s) skai.io
Cookie Name wordpress_sec_,wordpress_test_cookie,wp-postpass_*, wordpresspass_*, wordpressuser_*
Cookie Expiry Session / 1 Year

We use these cookies to enhance functionality and allow for personalisation, such as live chats, videos and the use of social media.

Show Cookie Information Hide Cookie Information

Accept
Name
Provider Owner of this website
Host(s) .chilipiper.com, skai.chilipiper.com
Cookie Name fs_uid, CHILI_PIPER_CLUSTER, guest-session, _sp_ses*, _sp_id*
Cookie Expiry Session / 2 Years
Accept
Name
Provider Owner of this website
Host(s) .comeet.co, www.comeet.co
Cookie Name visid_incap_, nlbi_#######, incap_ses_, referrer22_00a, incap_ses_1364_2167377
Cookie Expiry Session / 1 Year
Accept
Name
Provider Owner of this website
Host(s) skai.io
Cookie Name moduleFormPardotDownload
Cookie Expiry 30 days

Statistics cookies collect information anonymously. This information helps us to understand how our visitors use our website.

Show Cookie Information Hide Cookie Information

Accept
Name
Provider Google Ireland Limited, Gordon House, Barrow Street, Dublin 4, Ireland
Purpose Cookie by Google used for website analytics. Generates statistical data on how the visitor uses the website.
Privacy Policy https://policies.google.com/privacy?hl=en
Cookie Name _ga,_ga_*,_gat,_gat_*,_gid
Cookie Expiry 2 Months
Accept
Name
Provider Hotjar Ltd., Dragonara Business Centre, 5th Floor, Dragonara Road, Paceville St Julian's STJ 3141 Malta
Purpose Hotjar is an user behavior analytic tool by Hotjar Ltd.. We use Hotjar to understand how users interact with our website.
Privacy Policy https://www.hotjar.com/legal/policies/privacy/
Host(s) *.hotjar.com
Cookie Name _hjClosedSurveyInvites, _hjDonePolls, _hjMinimizedPolls, _hjDoneTestersWidgets, _hjIncludedInSample, _hjShownFeedbackMessage, _hjid, _hjRecordingLastActivity, hjTLDTest, _hjUserAttributesHash, _hjCachedUserAttributes, _hjLocalStorageTest, _hjptid, _hjSessionUser_2229986, _hjIncludedInPageviewSample, _hjIncludedInSessionSample, _hjAbsoluteSessionInProgress, _hjFirstSeen
Cookie Expiry Session / 1 Year

Marketing cookies are used by third-party advertisers or publishers to display personalized ads. They do this by tracking visitors across websites.

Show Cookie Information Hide Cookie Information

Accept
Name
Provider Linkedin
Cookie Name lidc, li_gc, lang, AnalyticsSyncHistory, UserMatchHistory, li_sugr, bcookie, TDCPM, TDID, bscookie, ln_or
Cookie Expiry Session / 1 Year
Accept
Name
Provider Skai
Accept
Name
Provider 6sense
Cookie Name _gd_session, _an_uid, _gd_visitor, _gd_svisitor, 6suuid
Cookie Expiry Session / 400 Days
Accept
Name
Provider Pardot
Purpose Cookie name associated with services from marketing automation and lead generation platform Pardot. The visitor value is the visitor_id in your Pardot account. This cookie is set for visitors by the Pardot tracking code.
Host(s) .pardot.com, pi.pardot.com, skai.io
Cookie Name pardot, visitor_id*, lpv*
Cookie Expiry Session / 10 Years
Accept
Name
Provider Google Ireland Limited, Gordon House, Barrow Street, Dublin 4, Ireland
Purpose Cookie by Google used for conversion tracking of Google Ads.
Privacy Policy https://policies.google.com/privacy?hl=en
Cookie Name IDE, 1P_JAR, NID, SOCS, CONSENT, AEC, _gcl_au, OTZ, test_cookie
Cookie Expiry Session / 400 Days
Accept
Name
Provider Meta Platforms Ireland Limited, 4 Grand Canal Square, Dublin 2, Ireland
Purpose Cookie by Facebook used for website analytics, ad targeting, and ad measurement.
Privacy Policy https://www.facebook.com/policies/cookies
Cookie Name _fbp,act,c_user,datr,fr,tr,m_pixel_ration,pl,presence,sb,spin,wd,xs
Cookie Expiry Session / 1 Year

Content from video platforms and social media platforms is blocked by default. If External Media cookies are accepted, access to those contents no longer requires manual consent.

Show Cookie Information Hide Cookie Information

Accept
Name
Provider Wistia
Host(s) .wistia.com
Cookie Name cb_anonymous_id, _sp_ses.2b40, _li_dcdm_c, __hssrc, _gcl_au, _clsk, hubspotutk, _sp_id.2b40, __hssc, __hstc, _uetsid, _uetvid, _gid, _ga, _ga_GQR109DZ3Y, _lc2, fpi, _ex-pricing-cta, _fbp, cb_group_id, cb_user_id, _clck
Cookie Expiry Session / 400 Days
Accept
Name
Provider Meta Platforms Ireland Limited, 4 Grand Canal Square, Dublin 2, Ireland
Purpose Used to unblock Instagram content.
Privacy Policy https://www.instagram.com/legal/privacy/
Host(s) .instagram.com
Cookie Name pigeon_state
Cookie Expiry Session
Accept
Name
Provider Openstreetmap Foundation, St John’s Innovation Centre, Cowley Road, Cambridge CB4 0WS, United Kingdom
Purpose Used to unblock OpenStreetMap content.
Privacy Policy https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Privacy_Policy
Host(s) .openstreetmap.org
Cookie Name _osm_location, _osm_session, _osm_totp_token, _osm_welcome, _pk_id., _pk_ref., _pk_ses., qos_token
Cookie Expiry 1-10 Years
Accept
Name
Provider Twitter International Company, One Cumberland Place, Fenian Street, Dublin 2, D02 AX07, Ireland
Purpose Used to unblock Twitter content.
Privacy Policy https://twitter.com/privacy
Host(s) .twimg.com, .twitter.com
Cookie Name __widgetsettings, local_storage_support_test
Cookie Expiry Unlimited
Accept
Name
Provider Vimeo Inc., 555 West 18th Street, New York, New York 10011, USA
Purpose Used to unblock Vimeo content.
Privacy Policy https://vimeo.com/privacy
Host(s) player.vimeo.com
Cookie Name vuid
Cookie Expiry 2 Years
Accept
Name
Provider Google Ireland Limited, Gordon House, Barrow Street, Dublin 4, Ireland
Purpose Used to unblock YouTube content.
Privacy Policy https://policies.google.com/privacy?hl=en&gl=en
Host(s) google.com
Cookie Name CONSENT
Cookie Expiry 6 Month

Borlabs Cookie powered by Borlabs Cookie

Privacy Policy Imprint