Top Incrementality & Measurement Solutions for CPG
Tara Johnson is a marketing strategist with 10+ years of experience in digital strategy, content creation, and advertising. At Power Digital, she leads content planning, creating high-impact resources that boost visibility and drive results. Tara believes in no magic wands—just smart content and a passion for sustainable, authentic growth.
Power Digital is a full-service growth marketing agency helping brands accelerate their revenue with data, strategy, and execution. Known for our award-winning teams and nova technology, we bring clarity to complexity and build marketing that scales.
For CPG marketers, the measurement gap is more than frustrating. It puts growth-stage brands at real risk of misallocating budget. Retail purchases dominate the category, yet most insights remain delayed, incomplete, or siloed. Direct-to-consumer (DTC) data offers more transparency, but it rarely captures the full picture of brand health or demand creation.
That means marketing leaders can’t rely on a single data source or expect one “magic metric” to prove the impact of marketing efforts. Instead, the most resilient CPG measurement strategies combine multiple signals, each carefully pressure-tested against the realities of omnichannel selling.
Why Match Market Tests Aren't the Full Solution
Matched Market Tests (MMTs) are often positioned as the gold standard for measuring incrementality. However, for most omni-channel food and beverage brands, they don’t tell the full story and have unique limitations. The most common limitation brands face when trying to run match market testing is access to reliable and consistent POS data which is required for this type of measurement.
Match market testing doesn’t tell the full story due to distribution changes and other external to media factors. Was revenue growth driven by media or distribution gains? Even minor factors like end caps, localized promotions, weather shifts, or competitor launches can skew results and make comparisons unreliable. Without consistent retail execution and real-time sell-through data, MMTs rarely isolate the true impact of media.
That does not mean MMTs are irrelevant, but should only be a piece of the puzzle. As outlined in our triangulated measurement model, confidence comes from aligning multiple signals. This includes brand health trackers, in-platform lift studies, media platform leading indicators and attribution from retail media networks. Each helps validate what is actually driving demand.
Reliable Measurement Tactics for Growth-Stage Brands
Across Power Digital’s food and beverage portfolio, three tactics consistently rise to the top:
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In-Platform Brand Lift Studies (Directional, Not Absolute)
Meta, Google, TikTok, and CTV platforms all offer tools designed to measure the lift of paid campaigns. These studies provide directional value when paired with strategic set up based on what a brand wants to learn, which could include ad recall, brand awareness or purchase intent lift. The key is to pair these results with other leading indicators to look for commonality in findings.
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Brand Health Trackers
Brand health trackers, often coming from platforms like Nielsen IQ or __ are filling a critical gap by capturing demand growth that doesn’t show up immediately in retail dashboards. For CPG brands, recall, consideration, and repurchase intent can be leading indicators that correlate with retail sales velocity down the line.
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Retail Media Network Attribution
Platforms like Instacart, Kroger Precision Marketing, and Walmart Connect provide near-real-time insights into share of search, engagement and purchases. These signals aren’t perfect proxies for incrementality, but they reveal directional demand shifts—especially when combined with media spend data.
Taken together, these tools provide a mosaic view. The opportunity lies in how they’re stitched together.
Triangulation: The New Standard
Triangulation is less about finding the “perfect” measurement source and more about combining multiple imperfect sources to build confidence in decision-making. As Jenna Wookey, Sr. Account Director, CPG at Power Digital put it:
“A one stop solution for tying marketing efforts to in store results doesn’t exist. It’s an exciting challenge to use different methods of measurement to put the pieces of the puzzle together.”
Early-stage brands may only have access to a couple consistent signals, and that’s okay. The goal isn’t to chase complexity, it’s to use the signals you have and evolve it over time as team capability and tool access expand.
We enable brands to make fast, informed decisions that maximize profitability and growth potential in today’s competitive landscape.
For example:
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Pair in-platform lift studies with brand health survey data to validate whether ad exposure is translating into awareness shifts.
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Layer retail media search share with D2C new customer & returning to see whether media is not just driving trial, but sustaining loyalty.
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Use Google Trends or category panels as a backdrop to contextualize shifts in broader consumer behavior.
The confidence comes not from one clean report, but from consistent directional alignment across multiple inputs. For more on how frameworks tie measurement back to growth levers, see How CPG Brands Can Unlock Growth with the Power Circuit™.
The Power Circuit™ Framework is your no-fluff roadmap to scaling smarter—backed by $21B in data and built for brands that refuse to blend in.
Practical Advice for Marketing Leaders
Consistent, directionally aligned frameworks can strengthen investor confidence, tying spend decisions back to enterprise value, not just media efficiency. If you’re leading measurement for a CPG brand today, three priorities should shape your approach:
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Calibrate Expectations at the Board Level
Don’t promise perfect attribution—promise rigorous triangulation. Executives should understand that in CPG, measurement will always involve inference. What matters is creating a disciplined framework to reduce blind spots.
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Invest in Consistency, Not Just Tools
A fragmented test here and there won’t build confidence. Measurement gains traction when the same methods are applied quarter after quarter, creating a baseline for comparison.
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Tie Metrics Back to Business Outcomes
CFOs and investors don’t care about click-through rates or brand recall in isolation. They care whether media dollars are correlated with growth in velocity, market share, and customer lifetime value. Every measurement effort should ladder back to those enterprise-level outcomes. Directional measurement also plays a critical role in strengthening retail buyer relationships. Even without perfect data, the ability to show consistent velocity lift, demand generation, or geographic impact helps justify shelf expansions and co-marketing opportunities. Linking incrementality efforts back to enterprise value and lifetime customer economics is critical for food and beverage brands focused on growing LTV even with low AOV.
Next Steps
Measurement in CPG will never be as neat as a D2C-only business. But that’s not a weakness—it’s an opportunity. Brands that embrace triangulation, resist the allure of “perfect” tests, and commit to consistent, directional measurement frameworks will gain an edge over competitors who wait for clean data that never arrives.
Want a clearer picture of what’s driving velocity and growth? Power Digital builds triangulated measurement systems tailored to food and beverage brands, designed to reduce blind spots, align stakeholders, and prove impact even when shelf data is murky. Let’s turn directional signals into strategic advantage.
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Tara Johnson is a marketing strategist with 10+ years of experience in digital strategy, content creation, and advertising. At Power Digital, she leads content planning, creating high-impact resources that boost visibility and drive results. Tara believes in no magic wands—just smart content and a passion for sustainable, authentic growth.
