Incrementality
Incrementality is the part of a result that happened because of an action and would not have happened without it. An incremental order is one the reminder, the recommendation or the ad caused, as opposed to one it merely touched on the way to the checkout.
What it means
Reports count touches: the email that was opened before the order, the ad that was clicked. Incrementality asks the harder question. If the customer was coming back anyway, the touch added nothing, and paying for it is waste. The usual way to measure it is a holdout group: withhold the action from a random share and compare.
Why it matters for a store
The gap between touched and incremental is where budgets leak. Retargeting your own customers, discounting people who were about to pay full price, and counting the same order in three tools are all touched-not-incremental. A store that measures incrementality buys less of all three.
An example
A store's Meta account reports 2.3 times the orders the store itself recorded for the same campaigns, as our Meta ads white paper found across Bulgarian stores. The difference is attribution, not sales. A holdout on the same audience shows how many of those orders Meta actually added.
How the agent uses it
The agent claims only orders you can open and keeps a holdout to show the real lift, as How it decides explains. Ads audiences count each purchase once and keep your existing customers out of retargeting.
Related terms
See also Holdout group, Attribution window.
See which of last week's visitors you missed
Thirty minutes, with your store and ad accounts open. Then 30 days free. A holdout group decides: if the agent doesn't add orders in 30 days, you don't pay.
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