It’s been a crazy year in growth marketing, what with the meteoric rise of TikTok, radical iOS privacy shifts and a staggering $240 billion poured into U.S. startups as of September 30.
All of this new money has meant heavier investments in growth marketing throughout 2021. The heavier investments have occurred during uncertain times, with startups scrambling to find ways to measure iOS conversions and unlock TikTok as a new channel.
Last year, I wrote a column on my predictions for 2021, which emphasized creativity being key, the inherent increase in attribution issues due to privacy changes and the power of leveraging influencers. While much has changed in this past year, there is a clear overlap from last year’s predictions with my growth marketing predictions for 2022. I’ll dive deeper on certain concepts like incrementality testing and continued growth in video engagement, while introducing a new prediction on the direction of ad platforms.
Incrementality 2.0
Uncertain months of endless scrambling would likely be the best way to summarizing the past year for paid channels like Facebook.
As we face industrywide degradation of data, marketers must become more comfortable with practicing incrementality testing — using controlled tests to understand the effectiveness of growth marketing efforts. As an example, if we wanted to test the impact of our Facebook efforts, we could pause the campaigns and measure the conversion deltas before and after making the change.
That’s incrementality testing at a macro level. But advertisers will need to be more sophisticated now. I like to call this the 2.0 age of incrementality testing. This new age will increase the precision and understanding of growth performance.
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Below is an example on the level of detail that can be achieved:
Multiple test levels
- Channel.
- Geography.
- Ad type.
- Ad format.
