Bayer drives incremental sales growth by optimizing for iROI

Bayer leveraged the power of our strategic partnership with the omnichannel advertising platform Skai to directly integrate incrementality measurement into media activation and most crucially, demonstrate that going beyond return on ad spend (ROAS) and optimizing to incremental return on investment (iROI) can improve the efficiency of advertising investments in retail media.

Challenge

Mature brands in a well-established category can find it difficult to drive truly incremental revenue growth, so the focus of the partnership was driving greater media efficiency from two well-established products: the painkiller Aleve and One A Day vitamins.

To accomplish this, they required a solution that could go beyond ROAS to separate incremental advertising sales from overlapping factors such as outside media investments, commerce factors like promotions, and external factors like seasonality and do so at a granularity and frequency required to be directly integrated into activation workflows to support in-flight campaign optimization.

A three-pronged solution

The innovative solution brought together a team from Bayer, Skai, and Incremental to create the retail media industry’s first instance of fully connected incrementality measurement and activation.

The Incremental platform, through a combination of continuous-learning models and ongoing experimentation, isolated the incremental sales driven by each campaign across both search and offsite (DSP), giving Bayer and Skai complete visibility in their iROI each day.

By incorporating Bayer’s unique business objectives, commitments, and strategies into the optimization engine, the Incremental platform was able to use its understanding of iROI, diminishing returns, and this business context to generate optimal daily budget recommendations for every campaign. These budget recommendations kept the overall level of investment with the retail media network flat, but generated more sales by shifting investment from less to more incremental campaigns.

Through direct integration to Skai, these incrementality signals and optimal campaign budgets seamlessly flowed into existing campaign management workflows within Skai. This direct integration enabled more than 1,000 daily budget optimizations to take place with ease.

Every day, Incremental’s model compared the predicted impact of these optimizations to what actually occurred to drive a continuous-learning feedback loop.

Results for the Incremental-Skai-Bayer Pilot

Improved Workflow Efficiencies

Direct integration of measurement into Skai enabled optimizations to take place at greater frequency and scale than would be possible by hand, and also saved significant time and effort across the Bayer and Skai teams.

Improved Media Efficiency

Through the integration of Incremental’s campaign-level measurement signals and optimizations into Skai’s omnichannel marketing platform, Bayer improved its iROI by over 32%—a dramatic growth beyond the goal of 10%. Overall, marketing efficiency ratio (MER) also improved significantly during this time period, as topline sales accelerated faster while investment in marketing remained flat—signaling an underlying gain in media efficiency.