Control Group
A matched audience segment intentionally excluded from seeing ads to measure true advertising impact
The portion of your target audience that doesn't see your ads during an experiment. Used in incrementality testing to prove whether ads actually cause conversions or merely correlate with them.
How It Works
Typically 10-20% of your target audience is randomly excluded from seeing ads. Both test and control groups must be truly equivalent—matched on onchain activity patterns, transaction frequency and volume, protocol interaction history, wallet age, asset holdings, and geographic region.
Creating Valid Control Groups
Exclude existing users (they can't convert again), users who saw ads on other channels (contamination), and dormant wallets (won't convert regardless).
Advanced platforms create control groups by identifying users who match the targeting criteria based on their behavioral onchain targeting profile, then randomly withholding ads from a subset.
Why It Matters
Without a valid control group, you cannot distinguish between conversions your ads caused and conversions that would have happened organically. Web3's high organic discovery through social channels, communities, and word-of-mouth means many targeted users would find your protocol anyway—the control group reveals how many conversions were actually incremental.