Why Incrementality Testing Improves Advertising Performance in the iGaming Industry
One of the primary challenges of running an advertising campaign in the iGaming industry is measuring whether the campaign generates new players or if the users who registered after the campaign would have become players regardless.
Attribution models help to establish which marketing campaign generated the most conversions for a brand, but they do not answer the critical question of whether a brand would have sold to these customers without the campaign.
Incrementality testing helps to answer that critical question. It measures the business impact that marketing activities have on a company’s revenues, helping to provide a clearer picture of the true value of each campaign.
For companies in the iGaming industry, such as casinos, sportsbooks, or people who advertise for these companies as affiliates, incrementality testing can help provide more strategic spending on advertising campaigns and improve the profitability of the company over time.
What Is Incrementality Testing?
Incrementality testing measures the additional value that marketing campaigns create for a company.
Instead of determining which of the brand’s marketing channels received the most conversions from customers, incrementality testing determines whether the brand’s marketing channels created those conversions.
The additional value that each campaign creates allows companies to better understand the performance of their advertising efforts.
Why Attribution Isn’t Enough for iGaming Brands
Attribution models are common among digital marketing platforms.
These attribution models often ignore some of the most important performance metrics of a brand, such as:
Organic website visitors
Customers who have visited the brand’s website more than once
Customers exposed to various brand marketing channels
Returning customers
Incrementality testing offers a more complete view of the performance of a brand’s marketing channels.
Compare the performance of the brand’s customers who were exposed to the brand’s advertisements to those who were not exposed.
By measuring various advertising and sales metrics for these two groups, brand owners can accurately determine which campaigns best benefit the company.
Evaluate the performance of every marketing channel you use
Whether you purchase advertising channels for social media, search, video, or affiliate marketing, each channel has a different impact on your brand’s sales.
By evaluating the performance of each of these channels separately using incrementality testing, brands can determine which channels produce the best results and which channels to stop spending money on.
Improve the allocation of your marketing budget
By using incrementality testing to evaluate the performance of every marketing channel, brands can redistribute their marketing budgets to improve their profits.
Instead of spending money on any marketing channel, regardless of the number of conversions that it drives for the brand, they can focus on the channels that generate the most incremental value.
Measure the long-term value of the players you acquire
While acquiring as many new players as possible is a great goal for any brand in the iGaming industry, it is not the most important goal.
Rather than measuring the number of registrations made by players who clicked on your brand advertisements, brands should also measure the long-term value that these players provide.
Players who register with your brand should have a high value; they should make deposits frequently and for significant amounts, last longer as customers, and contribute to your brand’s revenue.
Test different promotional campaigns for your brand
Beyond testing the different advertising channels, incrementality testing can also be used to test the effectiveness of different promotional campaigns for your brand.
For example, you may run a promotional campaign for new players that offers them bonus money for their initial deposits.
Another campaign may offer players free spins on one of their slot games.
Testing these campaigns can provide valuable information about whether the promotional campaigns influence the behavior of players.
Reduce the waste that your brand’s marketing efforts create
Many brands continue to invest in various advertising channels without testing them.
Incrementality testing helps brands recognize which advertising channels do not generate additional sales and profits for the brand.
By reducing the waste that their marketing channels create, brands can improve the efficiency of their marketing campaigns.
Combine incrementality testing with your brand analytics
Incrementality testing is most beneficial when combined with other analytics reports for the brand.
Metrics to evaluate may include:
Cost per acquisition
Customer Lifetime Value
Return on Ad Spend (ROAS)
Deposit rate
Revenue growth
By evaluating the performance of various advertising channels with these metrics in addition to incrementality testing, brands can make more informed marketing decisions.
Test your campaigns throughout the year
The behavior of your customers will change throughout the year.
For example, more people will be interested in sportsbook promotions during the sports season than during the winter months.
Evaluating the performance of various advertising channels during these different times of the year can help brands to adjust their strategies to better match the market conditions.
Use artificial intelligence to improve your experiments
Artificial intelligence is playing an increasing role in the marketing industry.
Artificial intelligence tools can assist brands in conducting incrementality tests by identifying target markets, detecting anomalies, forecasting performance, and analyzing the results of the tests.
These capabilities increase the effectiveness of a brand’s marketing campaigns.
Common Strategy Mistakes
Many brands create ineffective marketing campaigns because they make a few common mistakes, such as:
Relying on attribution models that do not measure the important metrics of a brand
Running marketing tests for too short of a duration
Creating tests with control groups that are not similar to the test groups
Relying on registrations as the main performance metric instead of the long-term value of the customers acquired
Ignoring the significance of the test results
These common mistakes can be avoided by carefully planning the marketing tests that a brand runs.
Best Practices for Testing
To run successful marketing tests, brands should:
Use well-defined success metrics
Create control and test groups with similar customers
Use long-term success metrics to determine the impact of marketing channels
Run the tests regularly
Compare the performance of different marketing channels
Monitor the Customer Lifetime Value of each customer segment
Combine the results with existing attribution reports
Use the test results to make budgeting decisions for the brand
By following these best practices for marketing tests, the brand will likely see an increase in the effectiveness of its marketing and advertising campaigns.
Looking Ahead
As brands increasingly focus on user privacy, the role that incrementality testing will play in the advertising industry will only increase.
Future innovations in the industry will likely include artificial intelligence software that can automatically create marketing experiments, analyze their results in real time, and make adjustments to the campaigns based on those results.
These innovations will allow brands to have a more complete understanding of the business impact that each of their marketing investments create.
Final Thoughts
Overall, incrementality testing provides advertisers with a deeper understanding of the factors that drive their companies’ growth.
Instead of focusing on the conversions that their marketing channels drive, they can focus on the impact that their brand’s marketing channels have on creating new demand for their products and generating incremental value for the brands themselves.
For advertising companies in the iGaming industry, incrementality testing offers a way to evaluate the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns more intelligently and to improve the profitability of the companies that they advertise for. The more a company focuses on creating genuine business impact from the marketing efforts it creates, the better decisions the company will make in advertising.