Relative vs. Incremental Lift: How you can Leverage Both

Let’s say you own a pizza shop, and you’re running an ad campaign to get more people ordering your delicious pies. You set up a test:

• Exposed Group: They see your ad and start craving pizza.

• Control Group: No ad seen

At the end of the campaign, let’s say your control group only sold 10 pizzas and the exposed group sold 25, for a total of 35 pizzas sold.

🍕 What can Relative vs. Incremental Lift tell you?

➡ Incremental Lift answers: “How much of my total sales actually came from the ad?”

📊 (Exposed Sales - Control Sales) / (Exposed Sales + Control Sales)

• This number is always between 0 and 1. In this case 15 incremental pizzas because of your ad out of 35 total pizzas sold, which means 43% of your total sales were actually influenced by your ad.

➡ Relative Lift answers: “How much more did the exposed group buy compared to the control?”

📊 (Exposed Sales - Control Sales) / Control Sales

• This number can be over 100%, in this case your control group only sold 10 pizzas and the exposed group sold 25, your relative lift is 150%!

🎯 The Purpose of Both Metrics

🔍 Use Relative Lift to optimize performance between tactics:

✅ Which audience, targeting, geo, or creative messaging works better?

✅ Which channels are more effective within my media mix?

✅ How do I allocate spend efficiently?

📢 Use Incremental Lift to measure true impact:

✅ Is this campaign actually driving new demand?

✅ What % of sales came because of my marketing efforts?

✅ Would these sales still happen if I didn’t run this ad?

📌 Why It Matters

In the very first iteration of measurement many years ago within Viant’s Advanced Reporting, we focused solely on Relative Lift. We learned that if you focus only on relative lift, you might be optimizing for efficiency, without knowing total impact. We then added incremental lift, which if you focus only on incremental lift, you might miss ways to fine-tune performance. We found our customers appreciate both in the same UI. Your DSP should have both as well.

📢 Bottom Line

Great marketing isn’t just about improving results, it’s about ensuring those results actually matter.

#MarketingAnalytics #Incrementality #LiftAnalysis #DigitalMarketing #AdTech #GrowthMarketing #Advertising #MarketingStrategy #Lift #AdTechAIFiles