Mastering Incremental Growth: Unlocking Profitable Growth in Paid Media

Mastering Incremental Growth in Paid Media

It would be great to really dig into what incremental growth means through the lens of paid acquisition.

There’s been a shift, I think, in what incremental means, or like the way that brands should view incremental growth now in the eCommerce space. It used to be all about top-line growth—just continuing to drive revenue. Now it’s about what’s going to continue to drive revenue for us but also contribute profitably. That’s really what true incremental growth means now for a brand—growth that’s profitable.

So how do you think about growth, contribution, and growing margin within the business when it comes to advertising tactics? It’s very much about ensuring that when you increase your spend, your ROAS doesn’t diminish significantly, so you’re maintaining profit and not just spending more to make the same revenue, which would be non-incremental spend.

It’s really about setting up your ad accounts to drive new customer revenue from the lens of paid media, so you’re able to scale into audiences where you’ll actually grow, build awareness, and drive more purchases of your products. So I think the key focus is ensuring that if you’re primarily focusing on customer acquisition, most of your spend is directed there, while controlling frequency on retargeting to avoid overspending on non-incremental campaigns.

How would you, within the context of an ad account, assess whether something is driving incremental revenue? My first approach, looking at growth from both top-line growth and maintaining contribution, is seeing how much spend is going towards new customers and cold prospects through conversion-optimized activity. You really want to make sure the vast majority of your acquisition budget is going there, rather than on retargeting.

Then, start looking deeper at your seven-day click optimization in Meta and seven-day click reporting, so you can really understand that this is the attribution window most correlated with new customer revenue, especially if Meta is one of your primary channels. I think a common pitfall is spending too much on retargeting or existing customer activity that doesn’t drive incremental value. That’s really what I focus on when I’m auditing an ad account.

True Incremental Growth

A lot of brands conflate incremental growth with new customer reach, but that’s just not the case. Introducing a stack of new potential prospects to the brand, or new people into your world, doesn’t mean incremental growth. You can be advertising to completely the wrong people who are never going to buy your products. That’s not a good use of your marketing spend that can add incremental growth to your brand.

Really, we see that the brands adding the most incremental growth—meaning revenue growth and also contribution growth to the brand—are spending the majority on conversion-optimised campaigns, new customer acquisition, and building their ad accounts around products that are going to add the most cash to the business. Not just these minutiae tactics to spam everyone or trying to get everyone into their sphere of awareness. For people who aren’t going to buy anyway, that’s not incremental growth in a profit-first e-commerce world. 

Once you reach a certain scale, it doesn’t have to be pure conversions. You can buy on different objectives, like brand awareness on Meta, for example, in an incremental way. It’s about ensuring that when you’re adding a supplementary objective, whether it’s traffic or brand awareness, you’re actually measuring how well it performs compared to when you don’t have it.

So when we’re running conversion lift studies, looking at a control that’s just conversion activity versus a combination of conversion and brand awareness activity, we’re starting to see greater than a 30% uplift in performance. This happens because you’re giving more signals to the algorithm to optimise better. But that’s not always the case.

It’s not always the case, but it’s important to test. The advantage of a brand awareness objective over traffic is that it still gets high-quality placements, not just chasing cheap, low-quality clicks that you end up retargeting elsewhere. It actually tries to reach people who are going to recall your brand within two days.

That’s the optimisation—it usually shows up in-feed and in high-priority placements, so it works well for brands that aren’t in very competitive spaces. That’s why it can be effective. It’s about understanding how that fits into your marketing mix. Probably less than 20%, maybe even less than 10% of your media spend, should go on this kind of activity for an e-com brand, but it’s still important. It stops you from getting stuck in an echo chamber, which can happen.

That’s when things start to plateau, if you’re just hammering one creative theme and honing in on a small section of the population rather than appealing to new people. That’s where you’ll start to see lateral scale in the market.

Unlocking Incremental Growth

To really focus on one marketing angle, in the context of your paid social advertising, means you’re honing in on a specific demographic. You can add incremental growth by discovering another marketing angle that resonates with an additional subset of the population. It doesn’t have to mean buying with a different objective. From a marketing perspective, you can get incremental growth by targeting things from a different lens.

We’ve talked about building out ad accounts with campaigns focused on different products, but on Meta, you can break out by whatever category or theme you like—whether it’s content style, marketing angle, UGC versus more polished studio shots, for example. Those appeal to very different types of people, so make sure you’re using all these tools to start testing and try breaking into different demographics. Then see how your reach changes over time when you start introducing these new campaigns.

So I think that’s really valid, and zooming out a bit, it’s interesting how the industry as a whole is shifting. When it comes to being an e-commerce marketer, it’s not just about “I can implement the best account setup to improve efficiency.” The playing field is getting more level with that. Now it’s more about, “How can I think like a marketer and actually implement a strategy that’s going to work for the business I market?” It’s not just thinking, “I can target broad and use Advantage+.” It’s about, “How can I actually pick out new people and sell to people who wouldn’t have been interested otherwise?”

That’s real marketing, and it’s a skill set that applies across any vertical, any marketing channel—not just paid media or digital marketing. So, I think it’s an interesting shift in the industry that’s catching quite a few people out.”