Only 8% of Target's Roundel Advertisers Use Incrementality as Top Metric

Only 8% of Roundel's advertisers use incrementality measurement as the primary performance metric for their business, according to Shawn McGahee, senior director of performance and insights for Target's advertising arm. McGahee disclosed the figure at an event for advertisers in New York on Tuesday.

The number exposes a gap between how Target measures retail campaign success and how most brands buying its ad inventory still evaluate performance. Target and other retailers have spent the past couple of years encouraging advertisers to adopt incrementality as the standard yardstick for retail media.

What is incrementality?

Incrementality is a metric that aims to determine the sales revenue generated by a campaign versus sales that would have happened without the ad. Measurement typically compares sales across test-and-control groups, isolating the lift a campaign actually caused.

The approach contrasts with last-click or platform-reported attribution, which can overstate a campaign's effect by counting sales the advertiser would have captured anyway.

What did the Roundel executive say?

McGahee said he is confident in Target's approach to measuring the metric but suggested that advertisers are not ready to fully rely on it, according to remarks reported from the New York event.

His framing separates two claims. The first is official: Target stands behind its incrementality methodology. The second is a candid admission about the market: after roughly two years of promotion, more than 90% of Roundel advertisers have not made the metric their primary performance yardstick.

What does this change for advertisers?

For practitioners, the 8% figure is a useful benchmark when negotiating retail media measurement. If a brand's agency proposes incrementality-based evaluation, that brand now sits in a small minority of Roundel buyers.

The gap also signals practical constraints. Test-and-control measurement requires scale, time and clean data separation, which smaller advertisers may struggle to fund. Until adoption rises, brands should expect mixed measurement standards across their retail media portfolios and press Target for detail on how incrementality tests are constructed.

Whether the adoption rate climbs past single digits will depend on whether Target can demonstrate that incrementality results translate into budget decisions brands can defend internally.