Measurement Platforms Full Review

INCRMNTAL

www.incrmntal.com

• Type: Incrementality Measurement
• Platforms: Cross Platform
• Core Offering:
  • Continuous Incrementality Measurement with no disruption to marketing activities

INCRMNTAL was founded in 2020 as an continuous incrementality measurement platform. It’s the only platform that uses causal inference technology for marketing, offering marketers the ability to run online measurements through the platform without needing to do anything special. The incremental platform uses attribution data to calculate the incremental value of campaigns and ad networks allowing advertisers to increase their ROI by focusing on the activities that are generating the most incremental sales.

INCRMNTAL was the only measurement platform optimizing to pure ROI and growth. All other platforms we reviewed provided reports on advertising returns, missing that a substantial part of our advertising spend was cannibalizing organic results.

This plus all the reasons named below (onboarding, support, insights, security, price) were why we all agreed that INCRMNTAL is the best measurement platform for Advertising.

Below you can find out point by point, what our impressions were and why we managed to reach an undivided conclusion as we have.

Integration / Development Needed

The integration part with INCRMNTAL is a real plug and play process. Each of us was able to run the integration process themselves with no need to get engineering or BI time. Those of us who used an MMP for both cost reporting and attribution (Singular, Adjust, Appsflyer MMP) – integration was just a button click on the MMP dashboard – almost the same as integrating with a new ad network.

Some of us did the integration with BigQuery and for this, the integration was just selecting or creating a table with the data incrmntal needs.

INCRMNTAL didn’t need any device ids – so we could run the full integration without being worried about privacy concerns.

High level description of integration

Onboarding

INCRMNTAL is a really simple platform to use. Configuring the networks we work with (to track marketing activities) is using single sign on or setting up our app key with each network.

The platform itself is frame around “tickets” (just like a Kanban board). Dragging a ticket to the “measure” column activates an incrementality test. Within seconds the platform moves the ticket to the “results” column with a catchy result title and explanation.

”Yummy Organics” was the most common use case we found in the first weeks of using the platform. Testing out channels, campaigns (specifically new ones) helped us reduce massive amounts of waste we had. One of us found that nearly 50% of their budget was redundant.

The more we used the platform, the more we started seeing other types of insights.

We managed to increase spend at a higher ROI than ever.

Most of us also had our BI / data science involved in the demo. Our data scientists and analytics teams were somewhat skeptical that INCRMNTAL will be a black box – but to our surprise – INCRMNTAL actually provides the full data science behind each recommendation made through the system, even a “confidence level %”. The platform shows influencing factors, special time series data, and allowed us to input our own features to to improve the results each of us got from the algorithm (for example – competitor data, share price, google trends – whatever we knew that might influence our own results). Features like “weather” and “holidays” were already baked in.

Support

Support is one of the few areas where INCRMNTAL were not at the top. To be fair, they still have a small team and therefore, support was mostly online and if you had to get on a call with them, you usually spoke with the CEO (Maor). It was nice however, as he’s a veteran in the community and pretty well known person.

On the other hand – INCRMNTAL required no technical resources for onboarding or integration. They don’t even have an SDK – and all of us were able to integrate with the platform with no developers needed (big plus!).

INCRMNTAL offers a ton of online documentation, technical documentation (explaining the algorithms) and if you’re an enterprise customer (most of us were) – we also had a direct slack channel where we could ask questions directly to INCRMNTAL’s product and development team.

INCRMNTAL is also accepting feature requests from customers and they have a voting platform where the community of their customers can choose which feature should get prioritized.

Useful insights

Here INCRMNTAL was the star of the show. Rather than providing data reports, the platform outputs what it finds (alongside the full statistical data).

The team at incrmntal came up with 7 use cases they alert on:

• “Yummy Organics” – insights for the scenario where paid campaigns are getting credit over one another or worse – over conversions that would have been attributed organically if it was not for the campaigns.
• “Ride the wave” – an external event (i.e. app update, OS version update…) that causes a spike in conversions so that we could enjoy the spike without giving all credit (and budget) to paid sources
• “The Diamond in the Rough” – this was the most useful insight. These were the campaigns that created the most incremental value.
• “What the F___ happened” – alerting over performance measurement changes where no action was taken. This use case saved us hours in viewing reports!
• “Divine Intervention” – capitalizing on a trend (i.e. competitor, national event) that made everything go up…
• ”Track the untrackable” – measuring the value of offline campaigns
• ”Anti-Yield Optimization” – helping us fight against artificial price inflation”

We started testing everything. It wasn’t really hard, and most of us went for the package that had no limits in the number of tests we could run.

We found crazy things – that probably always made sense, but if it wasn’t for INCRMNTAL, we would have no way to validate those “hunches”.

One of us found that a leading channel was supposably incremental for paid marketing, but 92% of the conversions attributed were cannibalizing organic results – so stopping all activity with this channel actually improved their ROI!

“Incrementality is the only true measurement”

Accuracy

INCRMNTAL relies on attribution data and treats it as a fact. The platform doesn’t challenge the numbers, but allows you as a marketer to correct your spend by making strategic and operational decisions based on measuring the actual value of your spend.

To operate it, we needed to integrate our conversions data (from attribution) and media costs (either from attribution or other data warehouse software we were using).

Out of 10 insights we got from the platform – 9 were just spot on. We also tested the platform for sanity (i.e. we spent some budget on what we knew was low quality sources) and there, INCRMNTAL managed to show us that those spends had no value whatsoever.

When it came to branding campaigns (campaigns we ran through influencer marketing, TV, etc…) INCRMNTAL did occasionally gave us the recommendation that the spend was not creating value – but after making a change (i.e. lowering the budget, or stopping the campaign) the platform gave us an opposite recommendation. We found that a bit tedious.

Secure

INCRMNTAL uses statistical data and therefore, is very dependable. it did show us repeatedly that attribution was not enough.

The problem with the attribution solutions was that fraudsters knew that as long as they get credit from an attribution software – advertisers would give them more and more budgets.

INCRMNTAL does not have this problem. It basically uses the attribution data and “overrides” it with adding a layer that measures the value of the conversions you get.

It’s not like “LTV optimization” – it’s beyond.

Privacy compliant

”Could you please uncheck the device ID sharing?” – this was said to one of us that had device sharing on by default on their attribution solution.

INCRMNTAL doesn’t want device IDs. There’s nothing that says privacy compliant more than this.

For some of us that were sensitive about user revenue data – INCRMNTAL offered a solution for that as well – we could send out ranges or an index and the platform worked fine.

With adjust MMP – incrmntal only uses aggregated data. Obviously – same goes for SKadNetwork which provides aggregate data only.

Unbiased vs. Biased

Taken from the INCRMNTAL website:

INCRMNTAL makes the extra effort towards being completely unbiased. We could even integrate without exposing channel names and this had no influence over the platforms ability to measure.

The pricing model is flat and is not based on spend or traffic counts.

From what we checked, INCRMNTAL is not affiliated with any ad network or media platform and is completely independent.

Pricing Model

We really liked that incrmntal pricing is flat and not based on our revenues / spend / traffic / conversions. They offer 1 free option and 3 paid.

For small / medium sized businesses – the basic or business package was definitely enough, but for larger companies like us – Enterprise was the way to go.

The fact that the pricing is not based on our spend really helped us trust in the product.

We also appreciated that there was no commitment needed – incrmntal had both a monthly option as well as an annual contract (monthly billing)

This was a nice change. We were not forced to use the platform if we didn’t want to use the platform. We have only seen similar pricing models with companies like Trello, Slack

All other measurement platforms we reviewed practically have a contract that places a gun to your head if you want to opt out.

INCRMNTAL on the other hand, offers a money back guarantee if you are unsatisfied about the product within the evaluation phase.

Price

INCRMNTAL has several packages we could choose from. Most of us used the enterprise package (flat fees). The license costs around $4K if you sign up for an annual license that’s billed monthly, still giving you the option to opt out if you don’t want to use the platform.

incrmntal doesn’t invoice based on spend or revenues – so while we have different budgets, the average platform costs vs. our media spend was 0.06% !!!

We couldn’t show the pricing itself – but you can do the math yourself:

Review Summary:

INCRMNTAL was the best marketing measurement platform we tried. There was no debate. It was the only platform that actually gave us on-going insights, pointing us exactly towards optimization ideas that helped improve our ROI. INCRMNTAL didn’t replace the need for attribution, but worked using any of the attribution providers each of us used. We were able to integrate into the platform with no engineering support. The platform runs incrementality measurement in seconds (!!!!). We also appreciated the flat pricing plans, and low price to value point. Most of us used the enterprise package, but some of us used the basic and business packages which gave us the ability to run unlimited tests across all of our apps.

Important to mention is that INCRMNTAL was the only platform that wanted nothing to do with sensitive data.

Pros & Cons:

• Incrementality measurement = measuring the actual contribution Advertising had over user acquisition and sales
• Integration was easy and required no tech resources
• Pricing model was unbiased. The price was a flat fee based on the package we chose
• The platform didn’t need device IDs or alternatives
• The results came as insights rather than messy reports that were impossible to interpret

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