How MMM Helps in Marketing Strategy: A Deep Dive into Google’s Meridian

As a conscientious, result-oriented, number-driven marketer, you often catch yourself staring at marketing reports, wondering whether your paid search, social ads, or TV spots are actually doing anything. 

You’re not alone. Marketing measurement has always been tricky, and let’s be honest, most attribution models are either overly simplistic or way too complex to make real sense.

Add to this mix the death of third-party cookies, pumped up privacy regulations (no, we ain’t complaining, though!), and the explosion of new ad platforms, and you really don’t know where to invest your ad budget safely!

What’s a girl gotta do? How do you prove to stakeholders that your marketing dollars are well spent?

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We get ya, buddy! 

That’s where Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) comes in like your knight in shining armor. And if you think MMM is some outdated relic from the days of Mad Men, allow us to burst that pretty bubble. 

Google’s Meridian is here to shake things up, offering a modern, data-driven approach to marketing measurement that actually works.

By the end of the blog, you will know if Meridian is the right fit for analyzing your marketing efforts!

Rediscovering MMM: The comeback kid of marketing attribution

In the good old days, when TV, print, and radio called the shots in the ad world, MMM remained the gold standard for measuring marketing effectiveness. It used statistical models to determine how different marketing channels contributed to sales.

Circa, the advent of the digital arena, wherein everyone became obsessed with Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA), tracking individual user journeys across clicks and conversions. 

But thanks to increasing privacy restrictions, third-party cookie deprecation, and the rise of walled-garden platforms, MTA has become less reliable.

Marketers like you and me needed to come up with a cool new way to measure the impact of our campaigns. 

Enter MMM 2.0, powered by Meridian, Google’s open-source tool that makes sophisticated marketing measurement accessible, scalable, and (finally) practical.

An insight into how Meridian is set to transform Marketing Mix Modeling

In simple terms, Meridian is the Gen Alpha cousin of its more traditional boomer MMM. It’s designed to fit today’s fast-paced, data-powered world. 

Here’s why it’s a thorough game changer;

1. Tosses out the guesswork and gives a clear picture of what’s actually driving results 

Now, suppose you are running the whole assortment of Google Ads, Facebook campaigns, influencer partnerships, and email marketing.

You surely see the sale numbers pouring in, but can you confidently say which channel deserves the most credit?

Meridian steps in and removes the guesswork.

It delves into your historical performance and factors in a whole bunch of external factors like seasonality, promotions, and macroeconomic trends to give you a holistic, unbiased view of what’s really working.

For instance, you might assume that paid search is your top revenue driver, but Meridian could reveal that organic search plays a bigger role than you thought and that your social ads are mostly assisting conversions rather than driving them directly.

2. Helps make smarter budget decisions, minus the risk

Wouldn’t it be just perfect if you could test different marketing budget scenarios without spending a dime?!  Meridian lets you do just that.

With built-in MMM analytics, you can model various investment strategies to see:

• What happens if you increase paid search spend by 20%?
• How will shifting the budget from display ads to YouTube affect conversions?
• Should you spend more on brand-building campaigns or performance marketing?

In short, Meridian helps you figure out and fine-tune your marketing mix for maximum ROI, so you’re not just throwing money at campaigns and hoping for the best. 

3. Solving the “messy data” issue with search queries

If you are a small business holder, you probably know the biggest challenge with MMM. Yep, we are indeed referring to noisy data.

When you don’t have millions of impressions or conversions, it’s hard to separate meaningful trends from random fluctuations.

That’s why Meridian’s integration with Google Search query data provides a tether to reality. By comparing organic and paid search volumes, it reduces noise and improves accuracy.

4. A smarter way to measure video ads

While video advertising is powerful, traditional MMM models have treated impressions like a one-size-fits-all metric.

Meridian changes that by incorporating reach and frequency data. This means you can see whether your YouTube ads are actually expanding your audience or if you’re just showing the same ad to the same people over and over.

This helps you maximize the real impact of your video investments.

5. Bid adieu to black box metrics with full transparency and control

One of the best things about Meridian, is the fact that it’s open source! 

Unlike traditional MMM tools that operate behind closed doors, Meridian’s code is fully available on GitHub. This means you can:

• Use it as-is or customize it for your business needs.
• Have complete control over your data
• Build a marketing measurement framework that actually aligns with your goals.

The road ahead

On that note, Meridian is worth exploring when you want to remove the guesswork regarding where to spend your marketing dollars or when you are done with overcomplicated attribution models that really don’t work.
If you run ads on Meta and want to explore the power of user-generated content, we suggest reading ~ The Meta Ads Hack You Need to Use: How UGC Drives More Sales.