We’re pleased to announce Incrementality, by Northbeam.
Now you can run the trifecta of marketing measurement in one platform, all on the same data: multi-touch attribution, media mix modeling, and incrementality testing.
Northbeam’s incrementality seeks to solve the major downfalls of most incrementality testing solutions while providing easy, automated, and self-service test design.
Modern marketers need causal truth they can act on daily, not one‑off reports that sit in a silo.
Incrementality by Northbeam automates lift testing end‑to‑end and unifies results with your MTA and MMM so you can scale what works and cut what doesn’t, with confidence.
Finally, lift testing you can trust.
But first, let’s understand the problem.
Incrementality, defined
In a marketing context, incrementality is defined as “a metric that measures the additional growth, revenue or other outcomes directly caused by a specific marketing action, beyond what would have happened naturally.”
The “incrementality” of an ad campaign is how much revenue is attributed to that campaign, rather than the natural momentum of your business or brand awareness.
Incrementality measures what results marketing actually generates, rather than what marketing just claims credit for.
This type of experiment design has been around a long time. While incrementality has roots in analysis of variance (ANOVA) testing, modern incrementality testing emerged with the rise of the advertising industry in the mid-20th century.
Alongside media mix modeling, incrementality testing was a way for marketers (with access to much less data than we have today) to statistically prove the impact of their campaigns and marketing budgets.
Incrementality has come back into vogue in the last few years. As marketing continues to take more ownership over revenue generation rather than pure marketing metrics, incrementality is an excellent analysis to bridge the gap between finance and marketing.
Incrementality also fits perfectly into the process of testing and launching new advertising channels in the social media age – this analysis lets you easily understand if a new channel is working or not.
Of course, nothing is ever so simple. Just like with multi-touch attribution and media mix modeling, incrementality has strengths and weaknesses.
As the great statistician George Box said: “All models are wrong, but some are useful.”
The problems with modern incrementality
Here’s what nobody talks about: most marketing incrementality tests are a mess.
You spend weeks designing the test. More weeks waiting for results. Then you get a spreadsheet full of numbers and zero clarity on what to actually do next.
Was the test even valid? Did you account for conversion lag? Did regional bias skew everything? Is the lift statistically significant, or are you just looking at noise?
And the worst part: you can't tell if you just wasted a month and thousands in budget on a test that doesn't actually answer your question.
This is the reality of incrementality testing in 2025.
We’ve heard from hundreds of marketers who struggle with incrementality. If you’re reading this, perhaps you’ve struggled as well.
Here’s the problems we noticed with most incrementality testing:
Fragility and drift. Small changes in targeting, pacing, or regional volatility can quietly invalidate results. Most tools or agencies (who get paid for each test) don’t tell you when a test has gone off the rails.
Siloed outputs. Reports live outside your daily source of truth, making it hard to reconcile lift with MTA reads, MMM guidance, and budget workflows.
Manual orchestration. Spreadsheet‑driven setup and monitoring slow teams down and increase the risk of human error, especially when running multiple tests in parallel.
All of this results in hundreds of thousands of wasted spend, endless frustration, and a cycle of suffering for marketers.
We feel that marketers deserve better. So we built Incrementality, by Northbeam.
Incrementality, by Northbeam
Incrementality by Northbeam is a fully self‑service, automated system that runs inside Northbeam to quantify true causal lift across channels, from test design through to actionable guidance.
You can design, launch, and monitor incrementality tests across channels directly within Northbeam, while ensuring your tests stay statistically significant from start to finish.
The outputs give you clear strategic action directly inside Northbeam, ensuring you can take your learnings and apply them alongside your MTA and MMM analyses.
It replaces vendor handoffs, ad‑hoc geo matching, manual pacing/cooldowns, and disconnected readouts that never make it back into daily optimization.
This is the future of incrementality: automated, accurate, and actionable.
Why Northbeam is different
We designed Incrementality by Northbeam to automatically solve for the major challenges marketers face when working with other incrementality vendors, agencies, or self-built tools.
Here’s what makes Northbeam’s incrementality different:
End‑to‑end automation. From design to platform setup, pacing, cooldowns, validation, and teardown, all inside Northbeam, no spreadsheets required. Just pick your goals and launch.
Bias control (geo + MTA depth). Region selection and balancing leverage conversion lag, Clicks + Deterministic Views, and behavioral patterns to reduce hidden bias versus geo‑only methods.
Continuous validation. The system keeps validating pre‑launch and daily, alerting you before drift undermines test integrity — it won’t let you run a bad test.
Unified measurement. Incrementality feeds back into MTA, MMM, and benchmarks, closing the loop between experimentation, attribution, and planning.
How to use incrementality
As part of your three-part marketing analytics toolbox, incrementality is best for understanding the high-level impact of a campaign or channel.
Validate new channels or tactics (e.g., a new Meta bid strategy) before scaling. Use the results of your lift tests to calibrate targets for the future.
Test if you should recalibrate ROAS/iROAS targets when you suspect diminishing returns. Set incrementality tests to re-evaluate even your most established channels and campaigns.
Diagnose performance fatigue and decide where to reallocate. Confirm whether a channel’s incremental value still justifies budget.
Quantify halo across Amazon/retail/offline so you don’t underfund demand creation that doesn’t show up fully in clicks-only reads.
Plan monthly budgets with confidence by reconciling lift with daily MTA and MMM to avoid analysis paralysis.
How it fits your stack
Because Incrementality lives inside Northbeam, incrementality becomes part of your day‑to‑day operating system.
Alongside C+DV‑enhanced MTA and MMM forecasts, incrementality’s causal truth can help inform both tactical day-to-day bidding and long‑term budget.
Since all three analyses are in the same tool, operating on the same data, you never have to worry about conflicting perspectives or challenges incorporating one analysis into another.
Get Incrementality today
Incrementality by Northbeam launches in Q1 2026. However, we’re putting together a cohort of founding members.
Request a demo here to chat with our team about incrementality.
We are offering founding member bonuses for a limited time. Advertisers who join now can lock in 50% off unlimited tests for an entire year.
Incrementality by Northbeam turns lift testing into an operational advantage: automated design and execution, rigorous validation, clear readouts, and a direct line into MTA and MMM so you can act daily on causal truth.
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