Today we’re launching Meridian, the open-source marketing mix model (MMM) built by Google, available to all marketers and data scientists. To support marketers on their implementation, we’re also introducing a partner program with over 20 measurement partners trained and certified on Meridian.
Last year, we shared our vision for a more transparent, innovative and actionable approach to an MMM that is designed to help you better allocate your budget in today’s marketing landscape. After testing it with hundreds of brands globally and incorporating their feedback, Meridian is now ready for everyone to take advantage of its benefits.
Brands like Finder, an Australian financial company with presence in the UK, US and Canada, garnered actionable insights with Meridian because of its ability to be customized to their needs.
“At Finder, our mission is to help people make better financial decisions and we try to apply that approach to everything we do — including our own marketing. With Meridian, we now have much more confidence in our ability to measure the impact of our investments. This has moved us from investing time and resources into creating linear regression models from scratch, to an agile, best-in-class solution that our team can still own and manage. The insights we’ve gained have reinforced the additional value that YouTube drives beyond what’s visible with standard conversion tracking.” — Jennifer Snell, GM Marketing & Loyalty, Finder
Make smarter marketing decisions with Marketing Mix Models
Consumers engage with your brand while streaming, scrolling, searching and shopping, frequently doing them at the same time. To adapt to this reality, you need a way to understand how your marketing efforts drive real business outcomes. MMMs help you do that with established methodologies for budget allocation that take into account all elements of your business. They can also consider the impact of external factors such as seasonality, pricing and economics. Because they rely on aggregated data, MMMs measure performance in a privacy-centric way. MMMs go beyond the immediate impact, capturing how brand-building activities like TV commercials, ads on YouTube and Google, or social media campaigns influence future purchases and new customer acquisition.
Meridian: a more modern approach to MMM
Traditional MMMs, built for offline media and branding, have historically been unable to fully measure performance media, like Search ads, and AI-powered campaigns. They lack a modern approach, which may lead to inaccurate budget decisions. They may not update assumptions based on incrementality experiments or provide granular insights, such as optimal frequency or regional nuances.
Instead, incorporating a modern MMM, such as Meridian, into your measurement toolbox helps drive better business outcomes. It relies on Bayesian causal inference that allows you to blend your prior knowledge with real-world data and reveals the true incremental impact of your marketing. But it does much more for you.
- Uncover the true value of performance media: With Meridian, advertisers will be able to gain access to the MMM Data Platform. This means that you’ll get core MMM data (i.e. impressions, clicks and cost) for Google media, but also new value-add dimensions such as Google Query volume. So you can get more accurate insights, including a more realistic picture of how your paid search dollars are actually driving results, especially since Search has a high correlation with sales.
- Customize to your needs: Meridian, as an open-source modeling framework, offers full transparency, allowing you to examine its code and methodology. You have the control to modify the code and model parameters to fit your specific needs.
- Make accurate budget decisions: Meridian analyzes campaign performance based on the KPIs that make sense for your business, including sales, website visits, profit and conversions. As a result, you can understand historical performance and run multiple optimization scenarios and make the best use of your budget. Meridian also allows you to include other non-media variables to factor the impact of pricing and promotions on KPIs.
- Reach and frequency, redefined: MMMs have historically measured video in impressions, but impressions only tell part of the story. Ten impressions could mean ten people reached, or one person reached ten times. That’s a big difference and those two scenarios have meaningfully different impacts on your business outcomes. Meridian accounts for reach and frequency — not just impressions — to help you maximize the impact of your video investments.
- Experiments as powerful priors: Meridian easily integrates incrementality experiment results as priors, agnostic of the channel or the experiment. This means that your model can be calibrated with real-world results, for more accurate outcomes directly aligned with your actual business goals.
In the coming months, we will continue investing in Meridian by adding new features and improving the methodology to make it even more powerful. You can get access to Meridian by downloading its code on GitHub.
Ready to get started with Meridian?
We’re also launching a partner program with a select group of agencies and measurement vendors. These companies have been rigorously trained on Meridian best practices and have access to the most robust and granular MMM data for Google media. Partners like Analytics Edge, are ready to help marketers make better budget decisions.
“Analytic Edge is excited to apply our extensive MMM experience and to partner with Google on Meridian. Meridian integrates technical innovations to assess the indirect impact of search on marketing channels in the consumer journey. It enhances the measurement of “Reach” and “Frequency” for YouTube campaigns, helping advertisers with campaign planning. The seamless integration with Google Marketing Data Platform boosts productivity in data processing and improves the accuracy of the data used in the model. Our collaboration on Meridian will help advertisers better understand the interactions between channels and improve their campaign strategies.” — Santosh Nair, Founder & Director, Analytic Edge
This global network of experts can help you get the most out of Meridian, including:
- Providing support and guidance from experts to implement Meridian and optimize your investments.
- Improving your media investments with access and guidance about Meridian best practices.
- Helping you tailor your measurement to your needs. With Meridian’s open-source nature, you’ll get complete transparency into how its model works including the ability to adjust parameters to align with your unique business goals.
Connect with a Meridian Certified Partner today and discover how to unlock the full potential of modern MMMs, gain deeper insights into your marketing impact, and drive smarter marketing decisions.
