Google’s Open-Source MMM Program Gets Major Upgrade

Google has rolled out a substantial upgrade for Meridian, its open-source marketing mix modeling tool, giving marketers a more powerful way to allocate budgets intelligently. This enhancement introduces new capabilities for measuring a wider range of business activities, moving beyond traditional media metrics alone.

The updated platform now supports the inclusion of non-media variables like pricing strategies and promotional activities. This allows companies to gain a clearer picture of how these elements influence overall sales performance. Another significant addition is the introduction of channel-level contribution priors. Marketers can now integrate their own expert business knowledge directly into the model, producing insights that are more relevant and actionable for their specific situation.

Furthermore, measuring the long-term impact of upper-funnel marketing efforts has become more straightforward. Marketers can better assess outcomes like improved brand recall and delayed purchase influence that materialize weeks after an ad is seen. This is made possible through refined binomial adstock decay functions that optimize calculations over an extended period. New marginal ROI (mROI) priors also help identify which marketing channel will deliver the highest return for the next dollar spent, using historical performance as a guide.

Originally launched earlier this year, Meridian was developed as an open-source solution to tackle modern marketing challenges in a digital-first world. Following extensive testing with a global roster of brands, Google released it publicly, highlighting the model’s transparency and adaptability as core benefits.

Many conventional marketing mix models fall short when analyzing digital and AI-driven campaigns, especially in complex areas like search marketing. Meridian is designed to close these gaps by incorporating Bayesian causal inference, seamless integration with Google’s own MMM Data Platform, and the capacity to validate model results against actual campaign experiments.

The importance of this tool lies in its ability to model cross-channel performance without depending on opaque, proprietary systems from vendors. Because it is open-source, data scientists have full visibility into the framework and can customize it extensively. Direct integration with Google’s systems also ensures access to highly detailed data for Google Ads, supporting more accurate optimization efforts.

Key capabilities of the platform include integration with the MMM Data Platform, which supplies essential marketing mix modeling data for Google media, even down to search query volume for richer insights. The framework is fully customizable, letting marketing teams adjust code and model parameters to suit their needs. It supports smarter budget allocation by allowing optimization against key performance indicators such as sales, profit, or site visits. The model also offers enhanced reach and frequency analysis, considering not just raw impression counts but the actual quality of consumer exposure. Finally, it incorporates experiment-driven insights, using results from incrementality tests to improve the accuracy of future modeling.

Businesses interested in using Meridian can download it directly from GitHub and start implementation right away. For those needing assistance, Google collaborates with a network of more than twenty certified partners, including firms like Analytics Edge, to support successful adoption.

(Source: MarTech)