If you’ve ever tried to work out exactly how your various marketing channels are performing or wondered what would happen if you cut back on paid search or pushed more into social, then marketing mix modelling (MMM) might just be your new best friend.
TLDR
Marketing mix modelling (MMM) helps you understand how all your marketing channels, online and offline, work together to drive business results. Unlike traditional attribution, which focuses on user journeys and clicks, MMM looks at overall performance trends across SEO, PPC, paid social, TV, and more. It gives you a data-backed, cookie-free view of what’s really working so you can allocate budget with confidence. As privacy rules evolve and tracking becomes harder, MMM is quickly becoming essential for marketers who want the full picture.
Table of Contents
What is marketing mix modelling (MMM)?
Marketing Mix Modelling is essentially a way of understanding how your different marketing activities work together and how they impact business performance.
Imagine you’re juggling SEO, PPC, paid social, affiliates, maybe even traditional media like TV or print. MMM helps you look at all of these channels and ask, “What’s really driving results?”. It doesn’t just look at the last click or the channel that closed the sale. Instead, it considers the entire mix, what happens when you scale one channel up, reduce another, or remove one altogether.
In short, MMM answers the big picture question: What’s the actual return on our overall marketing investment?
How does marketing mix modelling (MMM) work?
At its core, MMM is powered by data. You feed historical performance data into an MMM tool, this could include inputs from Google Ads, Bing Ads, SEO, affiliates, CRO, programmatic, paid social, and even offline channels like digital out-of-home or TV.
The model estimates the impact of channels using historical data. For instance, even if digital out-of-home doesn’t have clicks or direct attribution, MMM can show you whether it contributed to a revenue uplift during the time it was running.
There are various tools available (Google and Meta both offer their own), but regardless of the platform, the key is getting quality data from all your marketing efforts and letting the model analyse each channel’s activity and individual data.
Marketing mix modelling vs marketing attribution
This is a common point of confusion, and a good one to clear up.
Marketing attribution
This is more journey specific. It’s often click-based and relies on tracking user behaviour across sessions or users. Think GA4 attribution: it tracks the touchpoints that lead to a conversion. That’s great, but it’s mostly limited to online journeys and click events.
Marketing mix modelling
On the other hand, takes a step back. It doesn’t rely on individual tracking or cookies. It can incorporate both online and offline channels, even those where no one clicks anything. It’s more holistic, using broader data trends to measure impact.
For example, if someone sees a digital billboard and later visits your site directly, MMM can help show the indirect impact of that offline exposure, something that traditional attribution just can’t do.
Benefits of marketing mix modelling for marketers
Whether you’re in-house, agency-side, or a client looking for deeper insight, MMM offers a lot:
For in-house marketing teams
- Marketing modelling mix breaks down silos: Different teams (SEO, PPC, Paid Social) often work in isolation and measure success differently. MMM brings everyone to the same table.
- Data-backed decision making: MMM helps you understand what’s really driving performance so you can allocate budget effectively.
Benefits for agencies
- Better insights for clients: Many businesses lack the internal resources or data expertise to run MMM. Agencies can step in to provide this value.
- Holistic reporting: MMM shows you how the different services you offer (e.g. paid search and CRO) support each other, not just perform in isolation.
For your clients
- Confidence in spend: MMM helps you understand which channels are worth scaling.
- Cross-channel clarity: You get a unified view instead of trying to interpret multiple disconnected reports.
And a real world example? A client using MMM discovered their digital campaigns, even when not store-focused, were driving people into physical retail locations. That insight helped them realise their digital efforts were more powerful than initially thought, by influencing both online and offline sales.
Why is marketing mix modelling important?
MMM gives you what most analytics platforms can’t: a full, honest view of your marketing impact, both online and offline. It’s not restricted by cookies, clicks, or user journeys. Instead, it looks at real-world outcomes and connects the dots between your campaigns and your business goals.
As data privacy continues to evolve and cookie tracking becomes more limited, MMM is becoming an increasingly essential tool. It doesn’t just help you track your marketing; it helps you understand it.
So, whether you’re sending leaflets, running YouTube ads, or launching a TV campaign marketing mix modelling can help you see the full picture. Got questions about how to manage your marketing mix modelling? Or how to bring it all together? Please get in contact with our team, at Modo25, or you can email our team, team@modo25.com.
