Google wants to make it easier for marketers to tap into the insights of its Marketing Mix Model (MMM), Meridian. The company today launched a new code-free interface that helps non-technical users explore Meridian data to understand ad campaign performance better. They can also use the tool to stress test various scenarios for campaign planning and optimization.
MMM is a framework for tracking marketing efforts across channels over time—against the backdrop of other factors like seasonal events and economic shifts—to attribute sales to specific factors.
Due to its technical nature, MMM has historically been the remit of data scientists. But the new interface, Scenario Planning, is designed to make the insights produced by Meridian more accessible. Users can simply query the platform with natural-language prompts to interact with models or test different budgets to project returns on investment.
“It transforms the conversation from a look back at what happened to a collaborative plan for what’s next, regardless of technical expertise,” Google’s senior director of data science and engineering, Harikesh Nair, wrote in a blog post.
Asos and Shopify are among Meridian’s enterprise clients.
Meridian was introduced in early 2024, at a moment when the future of third-party cookies was under threat, and marketers were seeking out privacy-safe methods of cross-channel media measurement. But even with Google pulling the rug out on its years-long plans to deprecate cookies in Chrome last year, marketers have continued to pour resources into MMM, which can prove effective for identifying what actually drives sales and can weather the winds of increasingly stringent privacy regulation and non-cookie-related signal loss on the open web.
Today, MMM is gaining more investment from marketers than any other measurement methodology, outpacing incrementality testing, multi-touch attribution, and other approaches, according to recent research from Emarketer.
At the same time, the technical barrier to entry for MMM has historically been high; with Scenario Planning, Google hopes that marketers and data teams can work in tandem to better understand campaign performance and improve future outcomes.
