Incrementality 101

You’ve already learned about why the concept of “incrementality” is central to Upside’s impact on your business. Now, we’re going to explain a bit more about how Upside measures our incremental impact. Instead of explaining this in the abstract, we’re going to walk through Upside’s measurement methodology and how it works for an example Upside user - someone we’ll call “Ryan.”

Test vs. control

There are a lot of different things that influence your business’ performance on a day-to-day basis - pricing changes, market events, shifting competitor dynamics, and more.
 

To isolate Upside’s incremental impact on Ryan’s behavior outside of other factors, we find a set of customers who don’t use Upside and whose spending behavior looked just like Ryan’s before he started using Upside. We do this at an individual site-level, and for every card in Ryan’s wallet, to ensure we have an accurate picture of his pre-Upside purchase behavior.

By matching Ryan to this set of similar, non-Upside customers, we’ve set up a “test vs. control” experiment, where Ryan is the “test” subject (receiving Upside’s promotions) and the non-Upside customers are the “control” group (not receiving Upside’s promotions).

This is just like what happens in healthcare trials when testing a new treatment - some people get the treatment, and others don’t. Monitoring the difference in outcomes enables us to measure the impact of the treatment. 

Identifying Ryan’s control group

As soon as Ryan makes his first Upside transaction at one of your sites, our measurement methodology kicks into gear. We’ve already identified our test subject (that’s Ryan), and now we have to find his control group.

To do this, we look back through the past 12-18 months of your anonymized credit & debit transaction data to find customers whose spending behavior looked just like Ryan’s before he started using Upside. We identify a group of control cards for every one of Ryan’s cards.

Now that we’ve selected Ryan’s control group, we can measure his future, Upside-influenced behavior against the behavior of his control group - basically, what we would expect Ryan to be doing without Upside. We can’t predict the future, but we can measure any changes in Ryan’s behavior against his expected behavior to quantify Upside’s impact moving forward.

We know you make a lot of investments to grow your business, so it’s critical that we isolate Upside’s impact from the impact of your efforts (such as site expansions, pricing changes, or market fluctuations that are outside of your control). 

That’s why a control group is so important - any non Upside-related changes that influence customer behavior will be picked up by the control group, ensuring Upside never claims credit we don’t deserve. 

Measuring Upside’s incremental impact

Now that we’ve matched Ryan to his control group based on “pre-Upside” behavior, we’ll be able to clearly measure any changes in his “post-Upside” spending that are attributable to our personalized promotions. 

As we saw above, Ryan’s pre-Upside spending matched his control group almost perfectly. But, as the chart below illustrates, we begin to see a notable change post-Upside. Once Ryan starts using Upside, his total spending at your business begins to deviate when compared to his control group. Suddenly, there’s a discernible gap between the green and gray lines - that’s the impact of Upside’s personalized promotions.

That difference in spending is the incremental sales driven by Upside. The beauty of Upside’s measurement methodology is that it ensures we only take credit for this gap - not the other purchases that Ryan would have made at your business anyway. Said another way, Upside’s measurement methodology ensures that you only pay for fees & promotions on proven incremental business. What other marketing solution can guarantee that?

Impacting your entire business

We’ve been using the example of one customer - Ryan - at one site to explain how Upside works, but the real value from Upside comes in our ability to drive measurable impact to your entire business. 

By aggregating these results across all Upside users (all of the Ryans) at all of your sites, we can quantify Upside’s impact to your entire business! 

In summary: 

• Upside uses a “test vs. control” methodology to isolate and measure the incremental sales we deliver to your business. 
• This is how we prove our impact - and ensure you only pay for new Upside-driven, profitable transactions. 
• Measurable incremental profit on every transaction? That’s the Upside effect.