Sign in with Google Businesses focused on maximising ROI are doing one thing today.
They’re identifying how their various marketing efforts and media channels drive business goals, to optimise ad spend and returns.
For that, they’re using marketing mix modelling (MMM).
MMM is a privacy-safe statistical method. It’s used to analyse various data sources to identify the marketing activities and channels most effective and efficient at driving business goals. This helps businesses better decide how to allocate and maximise their budgets.
To satisfy this marketing measurement need, leading businesses are opting for Google’s Meridian.
Why businesses use Google’s Meridian to maximise ROI
When it comes to helping businesses maximise ROI, Meridian stands out in three ways.
1. Innovative measurement solution: Meridian’s innovative features let you fully and rigorously measure the impact of your offline and online channels, particularly digital media.
2. Transparency: Meridian’s open-source code and methodology gives you more flexibility and control in adapting the MMM to your needs.
3. End-to-end actionability: Meridian provides channel ROI metrics and optimised budget allocations, which help marketers work out their next steps to improve business outcomes.
Since its official launch in Jan. 2025, Meridian has been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times. Rajarshi Pandit, senior vice-president of analytics at Analytic Edge, a Google-certified Meridian Partner, reports “a more than 4X surge in demand” for Meridian among its customers.
Leading the adoption of Meridian are businesses in the consumer packaged goods and technology sectors. And following suit are those in the e-commerce and gaming industries.
Among the early adopters are fintech company Akulaku and real estate platform NoBroker. Here’s how they successfully maximised ROI using Meridian.
How Akulaku used Google’s Meridian to unlock its full ROI potential
After years of rapid expansion through the acquisition of app users, fintech company Akulaku was ready to evolve its app marketing strategy to focus on profitable long-term growth.
The challenge: Its last-click attribution model from a mobile measurement provider could not accurately measure its marketing effectiveness and help it make strategic decisions to achieve sustainable growth.
The solution: Akulaku worked with Analytic Edge to adapt the MMM for its needs. They tapped into Meridian’s features like Google Query Volume to accurately analyse how Akulaku’s channel mix contributes to its gross merchandise value (GMV).
The analysis covered everything from performance media and App campaigns to social channels and ad networks. It also included external factors like the ranking of competitor apps.
The detailed analysis, from data collection to presentation of findings, was completed in under three months — half the time typically required by other MMMs.
The findings: Paid media drove 75% of Akulaku’s GMV, and Google was a significant contributor to the overall GMV. This points to how advertising was essential to driving Akulaku’s sales.
Additionally, Meridian’s budget optimisation feature showed that if Akulaku optimised its budget allocation, while keeping its total budget unchanged, its GMV could potentially increase by 16%. And if it made strategic budget increases of between 20% and 50%, its ROI would likely go higher, even after taking into account diminishing returns.
Those marketing measurement insights helped Akulaku make data-driven budget decisions to achieve profitable growth sustainably. And it is continuing to use Meridian to measure its marketing effectiveness and maximise ROI.
How NoBroker achieved an optimal media mix with Google’s Meridian
NoBroker is a platform that connects property owners with renters and buyers. It uses a full-funnel media strategy to reach and engage potential property buyers and sellers.
The challenge: It wanted to maximise its media spend ROI but didn’t have a holistic view of how its media mix was driving results. It needed an advanced marketing measurement solution to help it make data-driven optimisations.
The solution: NoBroker collaborated with Analytic Edge to adopt Google’s Meridian, and made two strategic moves to tailor the analysis for finding its optimal media mix.
First, instead of transactions, it designated the event of a user contacting a property owner as the main marketing KPI and defined that as a lead. The event signals strong transactional intent and best reflects the effectiveness of each media channel.
Second, it customised the analysis to learn how its performance and brand campaigns contributed to the customer conversion journey. In particular, it wanted to know the optimal balance between reach and frequency for its brand campaigns across YouTube and multiple over-the-top (OTT) platforms.
The findings: YouTube is a strong choice for NoBroker’s branding efforts. Its cost per lead on YouTube was 69% lower than that on OTT platforms, and 31% lower than the total media cost per lead.
Additionally, Search was found to be its most effective performance media channel. Its cost per lead from Search is 14% lower than the total media cost per lead.
Furthermore, Meridian’s optimisation scenario showed that NoBroker could grow its revenue by more than 40% if it increased its investment in Google’s ad platforms by more than 20%.
The insights helped NoBroker make data-driven marketing investments to increase the ROI of its buy-sell business category. And it plans to optimise other business categories too, using Meridian.
Like Akulaku and NoBroker, your business can use Meridian to measure marketing effectiveness, make data-driven investments, and ultimately maximise ROI.
To get started, check out this resource on Meridian and its developer documentation. You can also contact a Google-certified Meridian Partner for a consultation or to get help implementing the MMM in-house.
Contributors: Hirotoshi Nakahara, Senior Marketing Effectiveness Research Manager; Siddharth Shrivastava, Regional Product Strategy Lead; James Lei, Greater China Measurement Specialist; Isha Puri, India Measurement Specialist; Chaitanya Srivastava, Business and Marketing Data Scientist, gTech Ads
