Nobody in your last budget meeting asked whether the paid spend was actually causing the revenue or

Nobody in your last budget meeting asked whether the paid spend was actually causing the revenue or just arriving in time to claim it.

That question is called incrementality and it is the most commercially significant question in your media budget conversation and the one with the least representation in the room where the budget gets decided.

Incrementality asks whether the revenue attributed to a channel would have occurred without the spend in that channel. In a business with brand equity, established organic search presence, and direct traffic from returning customers, a significant proportion of the revenue being claimed by performance channels was already coming. The campaign was present. The attribution model saw the campaign. The revenue was credited to the campaign.

The customer who typed your brand name into Google, clicked the paid search result instead of the organic result three positions below it, and purchased, did not need the paid result to make that purchase. They needed a search bar and a brand they already trusted. The campaign intercepted a journey that was already happening and claimed the destination.

Calculate what your paid media contribution looks like when you remove branded keyword revenue from the attribution. Then ask whether that number changes the conversation about next year's budget.