Incrementality startup INCRMNTAL announced the closing of its $4.1 million seed round on Monday, bringing its total funding to $5.5 million.
The round was led by Play Ventures VC with the participation of Capital of Heraclesa $10 million fund focused on mobile investments that was launched in May by Mobile Dev Memo founder and mobile experts Eric Seufert.
INCRMNTAL, which uses AI to measure marketing impact continuously without having to run discrete experiments, first released in October 2020 with $1.4 million in pre-seed funding.
Incrementality measurement helps marketers determine whether the results they’re seeing would have occurred even without any of their marketing efforts, that often elusive relationship between correlation and causation.
“It’s the best way to understand real value,” said Maor Sadra, CEO and co-founder of INCRMNTAL. “MTA in a world focused on privacy, it just doesn’t exist,” said Sadra.
The MTA Question
But INCRMNTAL was almost a multi-touch attribution company itself.
Sadra, who had long been frustrated with the state of mobile measurement during her time in executive roles at AppLift and Inneractive, joined her former Inneractive colleague Moti Tal after leaving AppLift in mid-2020. with the idea of developing a customized product. the true impact of marketing activities.
“I really wanted us to build the best multi-touch attribution solution in the world,” said Sadra. “But Moti, luckily, was the smartest, and he said, ‘No, no, no, we have to go after incrementality.'”
Marketers don’t need cookies or tokens to run an incrementality test, which is appealing in a world where user-level data is getting harder to come by. But, historically, incrementality testing has been, not another way to put it, a huge pain in the ass.
The classic way to run an incrementality test is to turn off an ad channel, wait a set period of time, restart marketing, and then attribute any drop in sales to backlinks.
But that’s often not feasible or even sensible, especially for larger marketers with high brand awareness. “Let’s say Coca-Cola shuts down their marketing, how much would that really affect their sales in the first few months?” Sadra said. “It would take a long, long time.”
always on
INCRMNTAL uses a causal data science approach to track marketing effectiveness as it happens by determining the connection between the cause and effect of every action a marketer takes across channels, whether major or minor. The goal is to track everything from the launch of a new TV campaign to the sharing of a creative piece on the web.
You can do this using a tool you developed called a marketing activity logger, which, as the name suggests, automatically logs every change a seller makes and pulls aggregate data by connecting to a seller’s platform partners, attribution partners, BigQuery or any other data. Deposit. Marketers can also add information manually, such as “Started running a TV campaign on ABC today.”
The INCRMNTAL model can then create a prediction of what would have happened if the advertiser had, for example, not run that TV campaign on ABC, while accounting for seasonality and other external factors.
“The model can handle when there are multiple activities happening on the same day,” said Sadra.
For example, INCRMNTAL works with two mobility apps, Bolt and TIER. During the tube blow in June in the UK, the INCRMNTAL system was able to recognize that the massive spike in app usage was unrelated to its paid marketing.
“Our idea is to measure a marketer’s activities all the time so they can see the whole picture and not have to plan and run experiments that might affect their business,” said Tal, CTO of INCRMNTAL and co-founder of Sadra.
But what about all the big brands betting on the MTA, like Molson Coors, for example, and AT&T? Most big advertisers now use MTAs, report says released by marketing trade org MMA Global last week.
“It’s just not scalable, because it has to be done per client,” Sadra said. “Even if you nail down an MTA model and then decide to start doing something new, like in-game advertising or CTV, your MTA model breaks and you have to go and create another one.”
Until next time
According to Sadra, INCRMNTAL hasn’t had to do outbound marketing largely thanks to Apple’s privacy changes and overall signal loss, but the funding will help the company scale its operations.
INCRMNTAL plans to double its engineering team from 11 and create sales and marketing departments by the end of the year, which it really needs. Until now, Sadra was the only non-engineer in the company and personally took care of all customer demonstrations.
The company also plans to launch a self-service integration later in the year so customers can test the platform for themselves before deciding whether to sign up for a license.