Effectively measuring return on investment is a prime concern of every marketer, but getting a precise answer is elusive. In response, Adlucent, the Austin-based performance digital agency, has developed Lift Mentality, an incrementality-testing technology that helps advertisers understand the impact of specific marketing channels on their bottom line.

Lift Mentality enables marketers across the e-commerce marketplace to answer their most pressing question, “How effective is my advertising?” to better understand channel effectiveness, allocate ad spend more efficiently and drive better performance. The new solution delivers insights into campaign effectiveness in about one-third the time of typical publisher tools.

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Highly flexible, Lift Mentality uses the advertiser’s own first-party data to design and analyze the test. There is no need for the client to provide and calculate specific data points, as is the case with other, more static models. The result is faster insights, more transparency, and greater ease of use for advertisers as they manage their marketing and e-commerce functions across multiple teams and outside agencies.

“We built Lift Mentality to settle many of the debates our clients were having about how to allocate their advertising budgets. Every publisher will tell you its solution is the most effective, but clients needed a neutral party to help them determine where to allocate their spend to attain the greatest lift in sales,” said Adlucent CEO Ashwani Dhar. “Running tests with Lift Mentality will give marketers better, integrated channel recommendations, backed by data, to prove the value of their campaigns.”

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Lift Mentality Case Study

Before launching Lift Mentality, Adlucent ran numerous tests with multiple clients representing a range of e-commerce brands and marketing campaigns. In one test, a global brand questioned whether spending more on Google Shopping would increase top-line revenue.

Adlucent loaded the brand’s internal revenue data and paid search spend on Google into Lift Mentality. The team then devised a 50/50 geographic split test, where more ad spend was allocated to the experiment group, to determine if top-line revenue lift was incrementally higher when advertising spending was increased on Google Shopping. The Adlucent team found sales lifted threefold on Google Shopping when the spend was increased by the same factor, validating that Google Shopping drove more top-line revenue than previously thought. The brand confidently reallocated its advertising budget accordingly the next quarter and plans to perform Lift Mentality on additional marketing channels.

While this marketer chose to test the incremental effectiveness of allocating more budget to Google Shopping, Lift Mentality can help marketers determine ROI on social channels, display advertising, email, TV, CTV (OTT), and print and track results by the advertiser’s preferred metric, typically revenue or orders.

Running a test using Lift Mentality takes 10 to 16 weeks, depending on the volume of traffic in the test channel. The process includes two weeks of defining goals and verifying the data to be used, followed by a few days to upload all relevant data, including at least 12 months’ worth of the advertiser’s first-party data. After a six- to 12-week test, Adlucent analyzes and reports results and makes recommendations.

Lift Mentality is the second proprietary data analysis tool created by Adlucent. The company’s Deep Search platform integrates complex data sets to create custom bidding algorithms and advanced reporting. Deep Search optimizes retailers’ product feeds, pulls in custom data sets and provides automated intelligent ad services across platforms, finding efficiencies and accelerating outcomes.