Estimating Incremental Lift in Customer Value (Delta CV) using Synthetic Control

This article explains PayPal's Delta CV (Delta Customer Value) framework, which uses causal inference and synthetic control to measure the incremental profit impact of product adoptions and user actions.

• •Delta CV is defined as a customer's incremental profit margin in the first 12 months after adopting a new product or completing an action
• •The methodology creates synthetic control groups using KNN (K-Nearest Neighbors) matching on 12-month pre-adoption transactional features, with each treatment user matched to up to 10 control users
• •Euclidean distance thresholds are applied to ensure match quality, and bias analysis validates the synthetic control group selection
• •Delta CV captures both direct effects (revenue from the product itself) and halo effects (increased engagement with other PayPal products)
• •The metric is applied to 40+ products across multiple regions to support strategic decisions, ROI calculation, campaign sizing, and product placement