Michael Kaminsky explains why attribution breaks down as brands scale. Attribution just checks if a conversion happened after an ad; incrementality asks if it would have happened anyway. Only conversions that wouldn't exist without the ad count as real impact.
When your brand is small and nobody knows who you are, you turn on ads, sales spike. It's pretty clear that the ads really are working. But as the brand scales, everything gets noisier. People hear about your product from friends, you're running ads on 5 different channels. Now it's no longer obvious what's actually driving purchases. And your attribution dashboards, which looked clean and confident when you were small, start to mislead you. So how do you figure out what's real? The answer is incrementality, and it answers a completely different question. Attribution asks, Did this person convert after seeing my ad? Incrementality asks, would this person have converted anyway, even if they never saw my ad? That second question is what actually matters because the answer tells you whether your marketing caused the sale or just showed up on the path to conversion. Imagine two parallel universes. In Universe A, you ran an ad and the customer bought. In Universe B, you didn't run the ad at all. In Universe B, did the customer still buy? If they made a purchase in both universes, it means that your ad didn't cause anything. It just happened to be there. If they only bought in Universe A, that means that your ad actually drove that incremental impact.
The Continuous Testing Loop That Separates Great Marketing Teams From Average Ones
