The deliverable

The incrementality report

One page, written for the meeting where the budget gets set. Every number on it is computed from the geo test at build time, including the four diagnostics that say whether the estimate should be believed.

Geo holdout readout
Phoenix, Denver, Columbus, Nashville · Jul 31, 2026 to Aug 27, 2026
All 4 diagnostics passedsynthetic control · 20 donors
Verdict

The campaign caused $448K of revenue on $640K of media. Incremental ROAS 0.70×, against 3.36× reported by the platform.

79% of the revenue the platform claimed was going to happen anyway, measured against markets that ran no campaign. That share is not fraud and not a bug in the platform. It is what an attribution window does when it cannot see a counterfactual.

The same four weeks, three ways
Platform-attributed revenue$2.15M3.36× reported ROAS
Before/after in treated markets$1.88M2.94× implied ROAS, season included
Incremental, measured$448K0.70× incremental ROAS
Diagnostics
Pre-period tracking error0.97% of daily revenuemust be under 2%
Post-treatment gap vs pre-treatment noise3.91×must be over 2×
Placebo, campaign backdated four weeks$661/daymust be small against $16K/day
Placebo rank across donor markets1 of 21, p = 0.048must be under 0.10

The rank test refits the model 20 more times, each time pretending a different held-out market was the treated one. The real treated markets show the largest post-to-pre gap ratio of all 21 units, which is the smallest p-value a donor pool this size can produce.

What this report does not decide

It measures revenue, not margin, so whether 0.70× is acceptable depends on contribution margin and on what the same money would have returned elsewhere. It measures these 4 markets over 28 days, and says nothing about a different creative, a different budget level, or the long-run brand effect that falls outside the window. And it rests on the held-out markets being a fair counterfactual, which is what the diagnostics above are for and why they are printed rather than filed.

Why the diagnostics are on the same page as the answer

A measurement vendor that always returns a confident number is not measuring anything. If the pre-period fit had come back at 4% instead of 0.97%, this page would say the test is inconclusive and recommend a longer pre-period or a different holdout. That outcome is a product feature, and it is the one that makes the other outcome worth trusting.