Last-click attribution isn’t dead yet, but Smartly is making moves like it knows how this movie ends.
On Tuesday, Smartly announced that it signed a letter of intent to acquire INCRMNTAL, an incrementality measurement startup founded in Tel Aviv in 2019 that focuses on causal lift rather than user-level tracking.
Smartly, which started life as a Facebook ads optimization tool way back in 2013 and now describes itself as an AI-powered creative and media orchestration platform, declined to share a deal price.
But Smartly CEO Laura Desmond told AdExchanger that she expects the transaction to close within the next couple of weeks and that all of INCRMNTAL’s roughly 25 employees, including co-founders Maor Sadra and Moti Tal, will join Smartly’s headcount of more than 900 people.
For Smartly, this deal is less about adding incrementality measurement as just another feature and more about rewiring how its platform makes decisions.
“There’s a big shift coming in the next 10 years,” Desmond said. “Measurement is moving from getting an understanding of what’s already happened to becoming real time and predictive about what will happen in the future.”
Always-on incrementality
As signal degrades and AI reshapes how people search for and discover products, Desmond said Smartly’s marketer customers have been pushing the company toward incrementality as their preferred source of truth for measuring performance.
“With the disruption of AI and with so many people now searching via ChatGPT or Gemini,” she said, “it’s becoming harder for more traditional measurement solutions to keep pace with the real-time nature of how customers are learning about brands and making decisions.”
Marketers have been asking for a way to connect measurement more directly to activation, Desmond said, rather than treating it as a separate, after-the-fact exercise.
INCRMNTAL’s pitch has always been “always-on” incrementality. Instead of forcing marketers to carve out control groups, halt campaigns or set up elaborate tests and formal experiments, Desmond said, its models analyze the natural fluctuations in campaign activity and infer the incremental impact of those changes in near real time.
Still, Desmond positioned incrementality as a complement to existing marketing mix modeling (MMM) and multi-touch attribution (MTA) tools, not a replacement.
“This isn’t an incrementality versus MMM or MTA story,” she said. “But marketers do need real-time incremental information in order to make the shifts that are needed to stay relevant.”
Where the rubber meets the optimization
Incrementality only matters, though, if it changes what marketers do next.
Smartly plans to feed INCRMNTAL’s signals into its existing optimization tools so lift estimates can help inform day-to-day decisions about what to spend and where.
In practice, that means using incrementality as the signal to determine when to pause or swap out underperforming creative assets, move budget between channels or get more granular with audience targeting, including reaching local markets and smaller segments.
Currently, Smartly runs more than 330 billion creative assets across its platform every year.
“But with more specific causal data, we think we can improve the amount of creative we generate,” she said, “and that will unlock even more performance.”
Video is a particular focus. In 2022, Smartly bought a creative management startup called Ad-Lib.io, which became the foundation of its creative suite spanning the open web, social and connected TV. Today, more than 50% of the creative on Smartly’s platform is video.
If the rationale behind the Ad-Lib deal was to expand Smartly’s creative tools, especially related to video, Desmond said, the idea with INCRMNTAL is to layer in measurement that can help tie specific creative and media choices to incremental outcomes.
Last click’s long goodbye
Smartly’s latest acquisition is happening at an inflection point for ad measurement.
Funnels are collapsing, search is transforming and identifiers are disappearing. Desmond said Smartly wants to be ready for a world where performance is assessed continuously and not just after the fact.
“Marketers want to know what’s working, when it’s working and whether any of that is leading to an incremental purchase,” she said.
And yet, somehow, last click is still hanging on, and Desmond said she doesn’t see that changing for a while.
“The concept of a click will eventually go away as advertising becomes more personalized and more conversational, but probably not for the foreseeable future,” Desmond said. “The opportunity for us is to get ahead of it – and to do that you need great data, great insight, strong reporting and the ability to activate on what you learn.”
