Meridian: A New Dimension in Marketing Budget Optimization

Budget allocation remains one of marketing’s biggest challenges. Traditional methods often fall short, providing only a broad view of channel effectiveness. How can you make informed decisions without knowing which investments actually deliver the highest return?

That’s exactly why Meridian was created by Google, for an innovative approach to Marketing Mix Modeling. It’s more than just another analytics tool. It’s  a solution designed to meet real business needs and support precise, data-driven budget decisions.

Think Meridian is a tool for the future? It’s already redefining intelligent marketing today.

What is Meridian and Why is it the „New Standard”?

In a world where marketers are drowning in data yet still searching for precise answers, Meridian transforms that data into concrete budget decisions.

Meridian isn’t just about describing the past or reporting what worked in a campaign, it’s primarily designed to answer the questions that keep marketers up at night:

• How did individual marketing channels impact revenue and other key performance indicators?

• How much did each media channel contribute to overall profit?

• What was the return on investment (ROI) for each channel?

• How can we optimize future budget allocation to maximize results?

Meridian delivers clear and intuitive answers to all of these questions. Its final report includes easy-to-read visualizations that allow for straightforward comparison of each channel’s performance.

Visualizations in Meridian’s final report help quickly answer key questions:

What is my baseline, and how do different media contribute to revenue?

What is my return on investment per channel?

Which channels are currently overspent, and where should I reallocate the budget to maximize ROI?

Meridian's Strengths. Why is it Truly a New Standard?

Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) is a powerful analytical approach that helps understand how various marketing efforts contribute to sales and other key business outcomes. By quantifying the impact of different channels, MMM enables data-driven budget allocation and strategic planning.

Building on these established principles, Meridian builds on proven, long-standing concepts from classical regression-based MMM. 

This ensures it accounts for critical aspects of marketing effectiveness, such as:

• Accounting for Media Saturation: It takes into account diminishing marginal returns. This means it understands that beyond a certain point, spending more on a channel delivers diminishing returns. This helps prevent overspending in channels that have reached a saturation point.

• Modeling the Carryover Effect (Adstock): It also accounts for the fact that a campaign’s impact doesn’t end when it stops running. It understands the carryover effect (adstock), meaning its impact can persist for some time even after the campaign concludes. This provides a more realistic picture of the long-term influence of your activities.

However, what truly distinguishes Meridian from many other modeling frameworks is its core reliance on an advanced Bayesian approach, allowing the integration of prior knowledge and insights about channel performance directly into the modeling process.

Beyond the essential capabilities of traditional MMM, Meridian introduces several groundbreaking innovations that redefine the standard for marketing effectiveness measurement:

• Modeling ROI Directly as a Parameter: Unlike classic models, Meridian allows you to directly model ROI as a parameter. This lets you align the model with experimental data (e.g., A/B tests) or expert knowledge. In practice, this translates to greater consistency with what we already know, and significantly less risk of misguided budget decisions.

• Leveraging Geographic (Geo) Data: Google explicitly states that using data at a geographic level (instead of just national) leads to narrower uncertainty intervals – meaning greater precision in estimating campaign impact. This provides much more granular insight into the effectiveness of your efforts.

• Readiness for Reach & Frequency Data: The model is ready to work with Reach & Frequency data, which is particularly valuable for brands with a high proportion of digital campaigns, allowing for a more precise reflection of their impact.

These features are what set Meridian apart as the new standard in Marketing Mix Modeling - a tool that not only analyzes but actively supports you in making informed, precise, and effective budget decisions.

Success Stories with Meridian

Theory is one thing, but how does it work in practice?

We’ve implemented Meridian for numerous clients. Take UNIQA, a leading insurance provider in Central and Eastern Europe. After rebranding, and facing the upcoming cookieless reality, UNIQA needed a way to measure the real impact of both online and offline media on sales.

We deployed Salestube’s proprietary solution powered by Meridian – sMMMart AI, to deliver actionable insights and enable smarter media optimization.

The results?

Thanks to precise modeling, the analysis revealed underestimated areas of efficiency. After implementing the model’s recommendations, UNIQA recorded measurable improvements across key metrics, managing to safely increase marketing spend, achieving even larger efficacy of the marketing budget:

• -2,6% lower sales acquisition cost

• -4,3% lower conversion (quote acquisition) cost

• +11% higher total sales

• +16% higher total conversion (quotation) number

with

• +14% increase in total budget

The results clearly demonstrate the power of Meridian. The total number of quotations and sales increased while the cost of acquiring both went down. These results are particularly impressive when considering the increase in the media budget during that period. Normally, higher spend translates into higher unit acquisition costs, but here the opposite occurred. UNIQA scaled its marketing investment achieving lower costs per conversion, proving that Meridian enables brands to grow faster and more efficiently at the same time.

Still Not Sure if Meridian is the Right Fit for Your Business?

Meridian is a powerful tool, but for whom is it most suitable?

• Companies looking to optimize their marketing spend: Especially those investing across multiple channels and needing a unified view of performance.

• Organizations striving for precision and ROI optimization: Those aiming to make data-driven decisions, maximize their return on investment, and minimize the risk of ineffective spending.

• Marketers seeking deeper, actionable insights: Companies that want to move beyond intuition, looking for a tool that enables a profound understanding of true campaign impact and effective budget allocation.

If your company is committed to achieving greater marketing efficiency and making more informed decisions, Meridian could be the key to reaching those goals.

Can We Help?

Meridian offers a powerful opportunity to transform your marketing strategy.As a certified Google Meridian partner, we help businesses turn advanced analytics into clear, actionable decisions that drive growth.

We offer two ways to work with us:

• Full Model Implementation – Our team manages the complete deployment of Meridian, from data integration to insight delivery, ensuring a seamless, end-to-end experience.

• Consultative Support – We work alongside your in-house team, providing expert guidance and technical support to help you implement Meridian with confidence.

Thinking about MMM for your organization? Let’s talk to see if Meridian makes sense for you.