IAB Europe has partnered with IAB US to develop a framework around incremental measurement in retail and commerce media.
The ‘Guidelines for Incremental Measurement in Commerce Media’ document has been released to help marketers, agencies, and commerce partners better understand and apply incrementality measurement.
The guide identifies four primary approaches to incrementality currently used by the industry – experiment-based, model-based counterfactuals, econometrics, and hybrid proxies – and explores how each method works and their strengths and limitations.
The framework also takes these positives and negatives and uses them to assess how good of a fit the approaches are for addressing certain business needs, labelling each as either a ‘strong fit,’ ‘conditional fit,’ or ‘limited fit’ in relation to each need.
The IABs conclude that marketers should align the method they choose to whatever decision is being made. The suggestion is that high-stakes strategic decisions should be measured using “methods with strong causal foundations,” while fast, tactical optimisation, or operational decisioning should be approached with “lighter-weight proxies, provided their limits are acknowledged.”
The document was developed by the IAB Commerce Board, IAB’s Task Force on Incrementality, and IAB Europe’s Retail Media Committee and Retailer Council, with previous work by national federations – such as Alliance Digitale and BVDW – also taken into account.
