Incrementality

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What’s on the agenda:

• Verse: what are you feeding your heart?

• Lesson: Understanding & applying incrementality factors

A verse I’m thinking about

What are you feeding your heart?

This verse doesn’t mean that if you do the right things you get what you want. It points to something deeper.

It points to the reality that what we feed our hearts dictates our desires.

When you “delight yourself in the Lord” you spend time with Him in prayer, study His word, and seek His will for your life. As you do this, your heart’s desires slowly reflect His heart - His desires.

But this points to a larger truth: the things we feed our heart manifest into the desires of our heart.

I think this is an important question to ask because there are good desire and their are bad desires and we often don’t stop to think what desire we’re feeding or which ones we should be starving.

If I want the desire to spend time with God, I need to start by spending time with God.

If I want to be fit, I need to surround myself with people who are fit or want to be fit.

If I want to be a good husband, I can’t feed my mind with negative or distracting thoughts about my wife.

If I want to be happy and at peace, I need to starve content and things that give me stress and anxiety.

It all comes down to what we’re feeding our hearts!

A lesson I’ve learned:
How to get the most bang for your buck with incrementality

At the core of growth marketing is the concept of incrementally.

Incrementality measures the impact or lift generated by a marketing activity beyond what would have happened without it.

If that made your eyes glaze over - let me give you an example:

Suppose an advertising channel has 50% incrementality. In that case, for every $100 it drives in attributed revenue, only $50 worth of the revenue is incremental - meaning it wouldn’t have happened if you didn’t use that advertising channel.

Conversely, if a channel has a 120% incrementality, for every $100 in revenue that the channel reports, it actually drives $120 in revenue - meaning it’s driving more value than you give it credit for.

The value of understanding incrementality is that it allows us to account for the true value of marketing and allocate the budget accordingly.

The trap:

When I start working with brands, they typically over-index on Google spend reporting they see a far better ROAS (Return on ad spend) than they do in Meta.

Their performance usually looks something like this:

• 1.8 ROAS on Meta

• 2.0 ROAS on Google Non-Brand

• 5.0 ROAS on Google Brand

(ROAS is return on ad spend)

But what if we apply the benchmark incrementality factors? Meta has far more incremental value than Google search. Here’s what it might look like:

• 1.8 ROAS on Meta becomes a 2.16 iROAS (1.8 × 1.2)

• 2.0 ROAS on Google Non-Brand becomes a 1.5 iROAS (2.0 x .75)

• 5.0 ROAS on Google Brand also becomes a 1.5 iROAS (5.0 x .3)

Despite looking like the channel is driving more revenue, more efficiently, it’s an inefficient allocation of advertising dollars!

My recommendation would be:

1. pull back spend on Google

2. stop wasting time and dollars on new channel testing

3. invest more into the channel with a higher incremental ROAS - Meta.

What does incrementality have to do with personal growth?

The lessons we can learn from growth marketing directly apply to personal growth and development.

Brands have limited advertising budgets, we have limited time and resources to invest in personal growth. Brands want to grow their contribution margin, we want to get the most bang for our buck with our activities.

The problem: we spend way too much of our time and money on low incrementally activities before ever maximizing the high incrementally activities:

My recommendation to most people would be:

1. stop spending so much time and effort on things with little impact

2. quit looking for new hacks to spark growth

3. invest more in the basics

Personal Growth Incrementality

Like brands looking for new channels to test, we as humans are always looking for new, innovative, or exciting ways to make improvements to our lives.

Yet, like most brands, the majority of us try and add more low incrementality activities to our schedule before optimizing or fully committing to highly incremental activities.

Below I’ve composed a list of High, Medium, and Low Incrementality personal growth and health tactics.

The High Incrementality column indicates the actions that will have the biggest impact on your life and the quality of your life.

If you only focused on these 5 things, your life would be amazing!

The Trap:

The trap for you is the same as it is for brands. We get attracted to the testimonials and ads that promise that low incrementality tools will change your life when the reality is they have very little impact.

They end up just being another thing we have to do, or worse, keep us from doing the important things in life.

Prioritizing Incrementality in Your Daily Practices

Look, there is nothing “wrong” with Low Incremental products and routines. I take supplements, I use a sleep mask, and I am trying to build my circle of friends.

The point is when you add them, not if you add them.

Here is the ideal way to stack activities:

Step 1: Start with High Incremental Activities

If the only thing you did for yourself was to focus on these five highly incremental activities - your life would be amazing.

Exercise has the biggest bang for your buck in longevity and health

Sleep plays a huge role in mental health, hormones, and how you feel

A Healthy Diet makes you feel great, keeps weight off, and keeps chronic disease at bay.

Spiritual Practices connect you to something larger than yourself and bring peace and meaning to your life

Close relationships let you be known, share your life, and do things together.

You don’t need anything else!

Step 2: Layer in Mid Incrementality Items

There is a reason Brands don’t just spend on high incremental channels, and that’s because, at a certain point, you’ve gotten all the value from them there is to get and you need to supplement.

If you’re exercising multiple times a week, you might benefit from adding a training plan.

Think of Mid Incremental activities as ways to break through plateaus.

They aren’t true growers, but when you flatline, they can change the trajectory!

Step 3: Cautiously consider Low Incremental Items

The point I want to make here is that despite what the world tells you - optimizations, trendy new supplements, and health hacks will never change your health.

That doesn’t mean they don’t work.

It just means the incremental value is so low it will never drastically change anything.

Cautiously consider adding these where you feel like you’ve progressed enough that you might get some benefit from it, but be wary of relying on these for growth and improvement.

The worst thing you can do is prioritize these over the highly incremental activities.

Surface area of accountability

Maybe the secret to weight loss is getting extremely sick. It’s a bit of an outlier, but I lost 5 pounds yesterday with a stomach bug, but hey… officially at my lowest weight at 154.5.

Only 60 days till Hyrox Miami ✊