Google launched its open-source marketing mix model tool, Meridian, on Wednesday, January 29. The tool helps advertisers track the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns and optimize ad budgets in today’s digital and AI-powered landscape.
Google launches Meridian
After testing Meridian with hundreds of global brands, Google has released it to anyone who needs help allocating and maximizing their advertising budgets.
Google said upon the release:
- “After rigorous testing with hundreds of brands worldwide, Meridian is now available to everyone, offering advanced customization and actionable insights.”
The company announced the launch on its Ads and Commerce blog, saying:
- “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.”
What is Meridian?
Meridian is an open-source marketing mix model tool that analyzes marketing campaign performance and conversion rates across multiple channels, helping you forecast future marketing results based on historical data.
Meridian provides access to essential Google metrics, including impressions, clicks, costs, and information on how your marketing investments deliver results. It also tracks the reach and performance of your video campaigns on YouTube and other platforms by collecting data on viewer numbers and how frequently they see your advertisements.
Meridian differs from traditional MMMs in its ability to measure AI-powered and digital campaigns. It allows you to customize code and parameters to suit your specific marketing requirements and include pricing strategies and economic conditions to gain a complete overview.
Google explained how Meridian can help advertisers:
- “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.”
Google helps you get started
To help you use Meridian, Google has partnered with 20 certified agencies to assist with implementing and optimizing your advertising campaign strategies.
Google says partners are trained in “Meridian best practices and have access to the most robust and granular MMM data for Google media.”
One of Google’s new partners, Analytic Edge, wrote:
- “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.”
Partners praise Meridian’s features and innovation
The initial reviews of Meridian from its measurement and agency partnerships are glowing and praise its innovative features and approach.
Jennifer Snell, GM of Marketing & Loyalty at Finder, spoke about the ability to measure and maximize investments:
- “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.”
Data Science Manager at Dentsu Digital Inc., Shuho Yoshida, praised Meridian’s innovation:
- “Meridian is highly innovative in that it offers an option for effectiveness measurement that aligns with the characteristics of modern media, such as incorporating logic that considers YouTube reach and frequency and improving the verification accuracy of lower-funnel media like paid search by introducing a framework for causal inference.”
The takeaway
Traditional MMMs struggle to measure modern AI-powered and digital advertising campaigns accurately.
Meridian solves this problem by enabling you to measure and understand your campaign’s historical performance, such as video metrics and search data, and run multiple scenarios to help you maximize your marketing budget in today’s digital environment.
