Advertising Measurements: How to Track Impact for Sustainable Business Growth

Return on advertising spending (ROAS) has become the default metric for many marketing teams. It’s clear, precise and makes CFOs happy. Spend X dollars, get Y dollars back. Simple… right?

Not quite. Here’s the problem: the more accurate a marketing metric is, the easier it is to manipulate. Want 2x ROAS? You can get it. Want 20x ROAS? It’s possible too. Just pull a few levers – increase retargeting, offer more discounts, reduce spend – and watch that ROAS number increase.

The real problem is that ROAS only measures your effectiveness in capturing existing demand, not creating new one. It’s like fishing a smaller and smaller pond and celebrating the fact that you’re getting better at catching the remaining fish.

In a recent Marketing against the grain episodeKieran and I discussed the solution. Don’t abandon ROAS completely, but expand your strategy with other metrics. This is where the bucket model comes into play: a framework for balancing short-term returns and long-term growth by dividing your advertising strategy into three main categories.

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The Buckets model: a balanced approach to advertising

To have a clear view of your the impact of online advertisingyou need to diversify beyond a single metric. THE bucket model provides a simple and effective way to organize your advertising investments into three main categories: direct ROAS, incrementality, And brand awareness. Each category plays a distinct role in capturing returns and creating future demand, creating a more sustainable growth model.

Bucket 1. Direct ROAS (demand pull)

Your first bucket is your slot machine. Here, you capture existing demand, with the goal of getting a direct return on every ad dollar spent. For example, if you see a 3-to-1 return on ad spend, then for every dollar you invest, you get three dollars back in sales.

The goal here is to maximize returns on measurable actions, like clicks and conversions, targeting audiences who already know and are interested in your brand. You should almost always saturate this bucket first, because you can directly track profits and effectiveness.

Bucket 2. Indirect ROAS (demand extraction and demand creation)

The second compartment focuses on incrementality — measuring the new demand generated by your ads. Incrementality models track how your marketing reaches new audiences who otherwise wouldn’t engage with your brand.

Unlike ROAS, which captures existing demand, incrementality shows you the “additional” value generated by your campaigns over time, especially in channels like video or display ads where conversions aren’t immediate.

Expert advice: Your incrementality bucket should help your first bucket grow over time. As you create new demand, you expand the pool of customers that your direct response advertising can effectively capture.

Measuring Incrementality with Conversion Increase Studies

One of the best ways to measure incrementality is to conversion impact studies. Here’s how it works.

Divide your audience by region (e.g. US states), broadcast your campaign in some areas and keep it dark in others. Then track the performance difference. If conversions increase in regions where advertising is active, this difference represents your incremental increase: the additional growth that would not have occurred without the ad spend.

Caution: The disadvantage of incrementality models is that they require regular updating. Plan to rerun your lift studies every three to six months (or a maximum of nine months) to maintain accuracy. This may mean temporary darkness in some areas, but it ensures you stay on top of how your listings are generating new demand.

Bucket 3. Brand ROAS (demand creation)

The third focuses solely on creating demand through brand building. Consider this your engagement bucketwhere you do not hold yourself accountable for ROAS measurements.

Instead, you invest in tactics that build familiarity and trust over time: billboards, podcasts, and other large-scale activities that help you expand your total addressable market. In this category, success is often measured by reach or impressions, rather than conversions.

Checklist: How to Use Buckets Together

The key to using the bucket model effectively is to fill each bucket in order. Here is your step-by-step journey.

Start by saturating your direct ROAS bucket. Run burst tests – spend a lot of money on a platform to identify the maximum budget you can spend effectively. This tells you exactly how much existing demand you can profitably capture.

Watch for signs that your direct ROAS bucket is full. When your ROAS approaches 1:1 (spend a dollar to make a dollar), that’s your signal to expand beyond demand capture.

Start your incrementality tests. Set up studies to increase conversions in specific regions while keeping others “dark”. This creates your baseline for measuring indirect impact.

Calculate and monitor your indirect ROAS ratio from these studies. This ratio indicates the number of additional conversions you generate indirectly. Update these measurements every three to six months to stay accurate.

Add brand awareness spending. Focus on high-reach channels like billboards and podcasts, knowing that these investments will trickle down to your other categories over time.
Continue to go through all three buckets. Adjust your spending as markets change. And remember: as your brand awareness increases, you create more opportunities for incrementality, which leads to more of the customers you want to capture through your direct ROAS efforts.

The essentials for choosing sustainable advertising measures

The path to sustainable growth is not about choosing between measurable and non-measurable marketing, but about building a framework that takes both into account. By following this roadmap and completing your buckets in order, you will create a balanced strategy. This allows you to capture today’s demand and create new opportunities for tomorrow.

To learn more about advertising tactics and statistics, visit full episode counter-current marketing below:

This blog series is in partnership with Marketing Against the Grain, the video podcast. It digs deeper into the insights shared by marketing leaders Kipp Bodnar (CMO of HubSpot) and Kieran Flanagan (SVP, Marketing at HubSpot) as they build growth strategies and learn from remarkable founders and peers.