eliya AI — For Business Decisions
Incrementality Testing

Bring Real-World Evidence into Your Marketing Decision-Making

Geo holdouts and controlled experiments to estimate the true causal lift of your marketing.

Correlation isn’t causation. Incrementality testing answers: what happens to sales if you turn a channel off? This enables marketers to understand the incremental ROI of each channel.

Definition

What is Incrementality Testing?

Without incrementality testing, everything we know about marketing channels are correlations or anecdotes. Incrementality testing is a controlled randomized experiment that tries to measure the true incremental lift of a channel. By splitting audience to control/holdout and treatment groups, Incrementality testing answers what is the true incremental impact or lift of a media channel. The experimentation provides real-world evidence about a channel’s performance. This information can then feed into a process that is called marketing mix model (MMM) calibration, which is grounding the MMM model with the causal evidence, not just correlations.

Also known as: Lift Testing, Geo Testing, Holdout Testing

The Problem

Why Platform-Reported ROAS Are Wrong?

01 / 05

Correlation gets mistaken for causation

Channels like brand search correlate well with sales, and so they can claim most of the sales. Even though the demand has already existed.

How We Help

Rigorous Experiments, Built and Verified our Experts

01.

Test design

Our team handles experimental design, whether market pairing or block design, and the statistical power calculations.

02.

Independent measurement

03.

Expert reviewed

04.

MMM calibration

Our Process

From Hypothesis to Calibrated Model

Define the question

Which channel, market, or campaign needs a causal answer.

Comparison

Incrementality Testing vs. Platform-Reported Lift Studies

DimensionELIYA Incrementality TestingPlatform Lift Studies
IndependenceIndependently designed and analyzedRun and analyzed by the platform selling the ads
Cross-channel comparabilityConsistent methodology across all channelsEach platform uses its own methodology
Feeds into broader measurementCalibrates your MMM for ongoing accuracyStandalone result, not integrated elsewhere
Test design controlStatistical power and market pairing set up frontLimited visibility into design choices
By the Numbers

20%

of ad budget is typically wasted on channels already past saturation, a finding incrementality testing often confirms.

3.2x

average ROI improvement once budget is reallocated based on validated results.

Agentic AI, Verified by Data Scientists

Matched-market and geo holdout experiment design, with statistical power calculated up front
Synthetic control methods for markets or channels without a clean holdout available
Causal inference and statistical analysis for lift estimation
Direct feedback loop into ELIYA's Bayesian MMM, calibrating the model's priors with tested results
Every test design and result reviewed by a data scientist before delivery
Matched-market and geo holdout experiment design, with statistical power calculated up front
Synthetic control methods for markets or channels without a clean holdout available
Causal inference and statistical analysis for lift estimation
Direct feedback loop into ELIYA's Bayesian MMM, calibrating the model's priors with tested results
Every test design and result reviewed by a data scientist before delivery

Find Out True Causal ROAS

Book a demo to see how a geo test could validate, or challenge, what your dashboards are telling you.

FAQ

FAQ

Find quick answers to common questions below

Still have questions? We're here to help.