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Marketing mix modeling (MMM) has long been a powerful, but often flawed, tool for measuring marketing impact across multiple channels. Traditional models struggled to keep pace with digital marketing, AI-driven campaigns, and the increasingly fragmented consumer journey. Enter Meridian, Google’s open-source MMM, designed to fix those gaps and give marketers more accurate, customizable, and actionable insights.
For years, brands have had to make budget allocation decisions with incomplete data, using legacy MMMs that failed to fully measure digital performance. With Meridian, that changes. It brings a modern approach to marketing analytics, blending historical data with real-world outcomes through Bayesian causal inference, and giving marketers a deeper understanding of what’s truly driving results.
Let’s break down why this is such a game-changer.
Why MMM Matters? And Where Traditional Models Fall Short
Consumers today don’t engage with brands in a linear way, they’re streaming, searching, shopping, and scrolling, often all at once. MMMs help marketers understand how these fragmented touch points contribute to business outcomes.
But here’s the problem: legacy MMMs were built for an offline world. They struggle to measure digital ads, AI-powered campaigns, and the full impact of performance media like Search, YouTube, and social ads. Many fail to account for incrementally experiments, real-world business factors, and even basic reach and frequency metrics.
This means marketers end up misallocating budgets based on incomplete models, often undervaluing key digital channels that drive actual business growth.
What Makes Meridian Different?
Meridian is built for today’s complex digital landscape. As an open-source MMM, it provides complete transparency, allowing brands and data scientists to customize the model to fit their needs, no more black-box vendor solutions.
Here’s how Meridian reinvents MMM for the modern marketer:
✔ Uncovers the True Value of Performance Media – Traditional MMMs undervalue digital channels like Search because they don’t account for high correlation with conversions. Meridian fixes this with access to Google’s MMM Data Platform, including new insights like Google Query Volume to measure Search impact more accurately.
✔ Customizable & Transparent – Unlike proprietary models, Meridian is fully open-source, meaning you can see the code, modify the parameters, and tailor the model to your business needs.
✔ Smarter Budget Decisions – Meridian lets you analyze past performance, test multiple budget scenarios, and optimize based on the KPIs that matter to you, whether that’s sales, conversions, or profit.
✔ Reach & Frequency, Finally Measured Right – Traditional models use impressions as a proxy for reach, but 10 impressions could mean one person saw your ad 10 times, or 10 different people saw it once—and that distinction matters. Meridian accounts for true reach and frequency to maximize your video ad impact.
✔ Experiment-Driven Insights – Incrementally experiments are the gold standard for measuring marketing impact, but most MMMs ignore them. Meridian integrates real-world experiment results, making your predictions more accurate and directly aligned to actual business outcomes.
Early Success: Brands Already Benefiting from Meridian
Finder, an Australian financial company with a presence in the US, UK, and Canada, was one of the brands that tested Meridian before its official launch. Jennifer Snell, GM of Marketing & Loyalty at Finder, shared their experience:
"With Meridian, we now have much more confidence in our ability to measure the impact of our investments. This has moved us from 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."
This is exactly why Google developed Meridian, to help brands get a clearer, more accurate picture of their marketing investments and optimize spend based on real insights, not outdated models.
How to Get Started with Meridian
Getting started with Meridian is simple, and marketers have two options:
1. Download Meridian on GitHub
Since Meridian is open-source, you can immediately access the code, modify it to fit your business, and integrate it into your analytics stack.
2. Work with a Certified Meridian Partner
Google has also launched a partner program with over 20 measurement vendors and agencies trained on Meridian. These partners, such as Analytic Edge, are certified to help brands implement Meridian, optimize marketing investments, and tailor measurement strategies.
"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. Our collaboration on Meridian will help advertisers better understand the interactions between channels and improve their campaign strategies."
— Santosh Nair, Founder & Director, Analytic Edge
Why Marketers Should Care
If you’re still relying on legacy MMMs, you’re likely undervaluing key channels, making budget decisions with incomplete data, and missing opportunities to optimize your spend.
Meridian changes the game by:
✔ Providing deeper insights into performance media like Search and YouTube.
✔ Offering full transparency with an open-source framework.
✔ Allowing customization to fit your business needs.
✔ Integrating real-world experiments for more accurate predictions.
✔ Helping you optimize budget allocation with data-driven decisions.
In an era where privacy regulations, cookie deprecation, and fragmented customer journeys are making measurement harder than ever, Meridian is the modern MMM solution marketers need.
The future of marketing measurement is here, are you ready to take advantage of it?
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