If you could analyze the contributions of each of your affiliates in a vacuum, determining what they contributed to the sales process would be effortless. Unfortunately, it’s just not that simple.
Instead, you can use a concept known as “incrementality” to measure the relative impact (also called the “lift”) of an affiliate’s efforts on the customer decision-making process.
Once your brand has defined incrementality, found the right affiliate partners, and identified your KPIs, you must implement ways of testing and tracking your partnership program to ensure productivity and performance goals are reached.
While incrementality measurements are frequently applied to internal marketing campaigns, they are also useful for testing and tracking the efficacy of affiliate programs.
What’s incrementality, and how do you test it?
Broadly speaking, incrementality is an avenue toward measuring an event that would not have occurred without a certain interaction. Whichever affiliate actions produce or influence the desired, brand-specified outcomes are considered incremental.For instance, you can use incrementality tracking to determine whether a specific ad view was the catalyst that resulted in a conversion. You can also use incrementality tracking to see how many online orders from one particular campaign resulted in new customer orders vs returning customer orders.
There are many ways to test and track incrementality. Some of the most popular methods include:- Monitoring exposure
- Evaluating the effectiveness of specific touchpoints, rewards, or value being offered to the consumer throughout the funnel
- Studying the average order value
- Tracking conversion rates or purchase paths
- Analyzing customer engagement – new customers, lapsed customers, return customers, and when they choose to transact with a brand or bounce from making a purchase
