Tight Budgets, Smart Decisions: Why Implementing Incrementality is Key to Measuring ROI
By Oden Croal, Business Director at Tug Agency
Budget pressure. It’s the reality every marketing team is facing right now.
CFOs are asking harder questions. Finance teams are scrutinising every line item. And marketers are being asked to justify spend in ways they haven’t had to before. The temptation? Pull back, cut budgets and play it safe.
But here’s the thing: tight budgets don’t mean you should spend less on marketing – they call for incrementality in your marketing budget. In other words, you need to get smarter about what you’re spending on. The brands that thrive under budget pressure aren’t the ones that freeze up. They’re the ones that can prove what’s actually working – and ruthlessly cut what isn’t.
The Question Platform Dashboards Can’t Answer
Here’s the conversation happening in boardrooms right now: The CMO walks through last quarter’s performance. Facebook drove 2,000 conversions, Google Ads drove 1,500 and TikTok contributed 800. Naturally, the CFO asks, “So if we cut one of those channels, we’d lose that revenue?” The honest answer is that it’s complicated because those numbers overlap, making attribution tricky. We don’t actually know what would happen if we cut spend. In fact, most attribution models can’t answer the CFO’s real question. What’s actually incremental?
Platform dashboards tell you what happened. Facebook says it drove 2,000 conversions. Google says 1,500. Add them up and you’ve got 3,500 conversions when you only sold 1,000 units. The numbers don’t add up. Platforms are designed to claim credit, not prove causation. The fundamental question remains unanswered – would that sale have happened anyway? That’s what incrementality testing solves.
What Incrementality Actually Means
Incrementality testing asks a simple question: if we turned off this channel, would sales actually drop? Or would customers just convert through a different route anyway?
Here’s an example:
You’re running Facebook retargeting ads. Facebook’s dashboard shows 500 conversions attributed to those ads. While this looks great at first glance, incrementality testing might reveal that 450 of those people were already going to buy. They’d visited your site, added items to cart and were planning to check out anyway. The retargeting ad didn’t create new demand. It just showed up while they were already in the buying journey. Only 50 conversions were truly incremental.
- Facebook’s dashboard: 500 conversions
- Actual incremental impact: 50 conversions
When budgets are tight, that 90% difference matters.
Why Budget Pressure Is Your Opportunity
Budget pressure forces clarity, and clarity is good for marketing. The CMOs who can walk into a budget meeting and say “here’s what’s incremental, here’s what’s not, here’s where we should invest and here’s where we’re wasting money” – those are the CMOs keeping their budgets. The ones still relying solely on platform dashboards are getting squeezed.
When you know what’s working, you can:
- Cut confidently. Stop spending on channels that aren’t driving incremental growth.
- Invest smarter. Double down on what genuinely moves the needle.
- Defend your budget. Show exactly what would happen if marketing spend got cut.
- Prove ROI. Demonstrate real business impact, not just platform metrics.
Where to Start
Start small. Pick one channel to test, run a simple experiment, turn off ads in some regions, keep them on in others, then compare sales. The difference shows you what’s actually generating incremental revenue. You’ll likely find a gap between what your attribution dashboard claimed and what actually drove new sales. That gap is your opportunity.
Once you see the difference between attributed conversions and incremental impact, you can’t unsee it. You start asking better questions, making smarter decisions and cutting waste and doubling down on what works. That’s what tight budgets demand. Not less marketing, but a more decisive approach to allocating resources by measuring what actually matters.
Want to understand what’s actually driving incremental growth for your brand? Get in touch with our Business Director.
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