How Axel Arigato Used Incrementality Testing to Refine Their Growth Strategy
Case: Axel Arigato
Background
Axel Arigato is a contemporary fashion and sneaker brand born at the intersection of streetwear, music, and culture. Known for its minimalist design aesthetic and community-driven ethos, the brand has rapidly grown into a global name with a loyal following across Europe, the U.S., and Asia.
As growth accelerated, Axel Arigato’s team wanted to ensure that scaling their digital investments would translate into sustainable, profitable growth—not just higher ad spend.
That’s when they turned to Dema to help measure and optimize the true incremental impact of their marketing channels.
"Dema gives us the confidence to make budget decisions based on what’s truly incremental, and letting us continue to improve our growth efforts."
Albin Johansson, Founder & CEO
Objective
Good news for profitability
Axel Arigato’s performance marketing team had already built efficient acquisition funnels, but scaling further posed a key challenge: increasing spend typically lowers ROAS, and it’s not always clear when more budget actually adds value—or just drives cannibalization.
They wanted data-driven clarity on three fronts:
- Meta scaling potential — Would higher budgets drive new incremental conversions or just higher costs?
- Google scaling efficiency — Could Google’s ecosystem absorb more investment profitably?
Branded search incrementality — Was branded search spend as effective as it looked in-platform?
Result
1. Scaling Meta Spend
We increased Meta budgets by 33%, lowering the expected ROAS target.
A two-cell scaling test was designed to isolate the incremental effect of the extra spend—one group received the increased budget (treatment), while the other remained steady (control).
Result:
Despite the spend increase, there was no significant incremental lift.The additional budget delivered little new value, indicating overspend and diminishing returns on Meta at current saturation levels.
2. Scaling Google Spend
Using the same two-cell test design, we increased Google Ads budgets by 33% to evaluate incremental performance across PMAX campaigns.
Result:
Scaling Google produced strong incremental returns, with an incremental epROAS exceeding 100%—meaning every additional dollar invested generated more than a dollar in incremental profit.
In fact, the incremental spend delivered an even higher ROAS than what Google reported in-platform, indicating that the additional spend was highly incremental—and likely more efficient than existing spend at higher reported ROAS levels.
In contrast to Meta, Google proved capable of scaling profitably within the tested range.
3. Evaluating Branded Search
Axel Arigato also questioned the efficiency of their branded search campaigns.While platform-reported ROAS looked exceptionally high, the brand operates as a wholesaler—where multiple partners and retailers also bid on their terms.
Result:
Incrementality testing revealed that branded search’s true incremental ROAS was roughly 9× lower than the in-platform report suggested.
Even so, its effective profit ROAS (epROAS) remained well above 100%, confirming that despite over-attribution, branded search was still a highly profitable investment.
Impact
Meta
Limited incremental opportunity at current levels.
Clear headroom for profitable scaling.
Branded Search
Lower true incrementality, but still profit-positive.
Introduction to the key metrics mentioned in this case study
epROAS
One of the most important KPIs for Ridestore in Dema's platform is the epROAS, which measures the profit return on their ad spend. By monitoring that metric closely by market, Ridestore can effectively allocate spend where they know they have the most profitable return on each marketing dollar spent.
Net Gross Profit 3
The absolute profit metric for commercial organizations in e-commerce. Following NGP3 accurately and updated, connected with all your other data, is a comparative advantage, enabling Ridestore to work smarter and faster.
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