As budgets tighten, channels fracture, and data signals fade, marketers face mounting pressure to prove campaign effectiveness, making smarter measurement a must.

Unlike last-click or multi-touch attribution models, which use correlation-based logic, incrementality testing uses causal-based logic to gauge which results were caused by marketing and which ones happened alongside it.

• Over half (52.0%) of US brand and agency marketers use incrementality testing/experiments to measure their campaigns, according to July 2025 data from EMARKETER and TransUnion.
• Some 27.6% say expanding incrementality testing is a top measurement priority, and 36.2% plan to invest in it over the next 12 months.

Retail media steps up

Digital platforms have long given marketers ways to measure performance more precisely, and now retail media is becoming an important part of that charge.

• Networks like Amazon, Walmart Connect, and Kroger Precision Marketing are racing to prove their ads drive incremental sales and new-to-brand conversions, not just visibility.
• Walmart and Amazon in particular are using their massive first-party data sets to help tie ad exposure to purchase data through closed-loop measurement.

Since each network measures performance differently, marketers need to ask critical questions about methodology and validation to accurately compare partners.

To support that effort, the IAB recently released guidelines for incremental measurement in commerce media, outlining key approaches like experiments, model-based counterfactuals, econometric models, and hybrid proxies, and when each is most appropriate.

A work in progress

There’s still a learning curve to mastering incrementality. Setting up control groups, dealing with privacy limits, and managing walled-garden data all demand time, skill, and coordination.

• A third of (CPG) brand marketers and agency professionals say they’re only measuring incrementality at a basic level, indicating room for improvement, according to The State of Retail Media report from Skai and Path to Purchase Institute.
• The top barriers to implementing incrementality measurement are concerns about the accuracy or reliability of results (44%), applying incrementality across ad types/targeting methods/retailers (43%), and limited tools or technologies (41%).

But due to more platform-based tools and technologies, incrementality is becoming more accessible for marketers.

• Conversion lift tools from Meta and Google make running experiments easier.
• Third-party vendors like Haus and Measured offer incrementality-as-a-service to brands of all sizes.
• Data clean rooms like Amazon Marketing Cloud and Snowflake provide a privacy-safe environment for advertisers to run incrementality tests.

In addition, AI tools are helping marketers move faster without sacrificing accuracy.

• To improve measurement efficiency, half of US brand and agency marketers have adopted AI/machine learning to automate reporting, found the EMARKETER and TransUnion survey data.