In marketing, distinguishing between correlation and causation isn't just academic—it's essential for optimizing your investment. The fundamental question remains: Did your marketing initiative actually drive consumer behavior, or would those purchases have happened anyway?
Traditional attribution methods struggle with this distinction:
- Last-click attribution overvalues the final touchpoint in a customer's journey and makes many unfounded assumptions about marketing impact
- Multi-touch attribution (MTA) estimates incremental impact through models rather than direct measurement
- Marketing mix models (MMM) use statistical correlations to optimize spending across tactics, but can't track individual behaviors
While these approaches have been marketing staples for years, they all share a critical flaw: they lack the experimental design necessary to establish true causal relationships between campaigns and purchases.
Randomized controlled trials: The marketer's scientific method
Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) solve this fundamental attribution challenge by applying scientific rigor to marketing measurement. For rewards and loyalty marketers, RCTs answer the crucial question: did our offer actually influence purchasing behavior, or did it simply reward actions that would likely have happened anyway?
How Incremental Lift Studies work at Kard:
- Create statistically equivalent groups: Divide your audience into test (80%), control (10%), and reserve (10%) segments
- Expose only the test group to your offers: The control group receives no marketing intervention
- Measure the difference in outcomes: Compare key metrics between groups to reveal the true incremental impact
This approach allows you to measure meaningful business outcomes like conversion rates, spend rates, average order values, and transaction frequency while controlling for all other variables.
The business impact of measuring incremental lift
The most valuable outputs from these studies are efficiency metrics that quantify return on marketing investment:
- Incremental Return on Ad Spend (iROAS): How much incremental revenue is generated for each dollar invested
- Incremental Cost per Acquisition (iCPA): How efficiently your campaign acquires truly incremental customers
Our recent incremental lift studies across various verticals have revealed compelling strategic insights:
- Transportation/Delivery Service: A campaign focused on new customer acquisition drove a 134% lift in Conversion rate, demonstrating the power of rewards in motivating first-time purchases.
- Health/Wellness Retailer (Case 1): Despite targeting existing active customers, the campaign generated over 10x iROAS - proving that even loyal customers can be influenced to spend more when presented with the right offer.
- Health/Wellness Retailer (Case 2): Strategic campaigns yielded approximately $5 iCPA while generating significant new and reactivated customer revenue, revealing efficient paths to customer acquisition through rewards.
This insight transforms marketing from a cost center to a revenue driver with quantifiable returns by helping marketers target the right segments and allocate budget where it drives genuine growth.
Building competitive advantage through data analytics
At Kard, our Marketing Science team serves as the central intelligence hub for data-driven decisions. We're continuously enhancing our measurement capabilities through:
- Advanced statistical models for more sophisticated analysis
- Automated pipelines to reduce manual processing time
- Comprehensive experiment databases enabling meta-analyses
- Interactive dashboards for self-service data exploration
By isolating true causal impact, our incremental lift studies give brands the confidence to invest marketing dollars where they'll drive real business growth—and the insight to stop wasting money on campaigns that don't move the needle.
