Lower funnel channels – branded search, retargeting, affiliate – always look like heroes in your marketing mix. They convert fast, scale cleanly (or so it seems), and look great last-click attribution. But these channels work because something else made them work first. If your media mix model doesn’t reflect that …
Why Lower Funnel Channels Can Mislead Your MMM (And What to Do Instead) Read More »
A somewhat unpopular opinion we hold at Recast: yes, GDP, consumer sentiment, inflation, and interest rates do impact business performance — but no, you probably shouldn’t try to control for all of them in your media mix model. That instinct to “control for everything” is understandable. It feels like the …
The Hidden Cost of Over-Controlling for Non-Marketing Variables Read More »
The goal of any media mix model (MMM) isn’t just to describe past performance — it’s to inform decisions .That means you need hypotheses that lead to falsifiable predictions that can be proven wrong — or right — based on the data. It gives your model a job, a target …
How to Frame a Testable Hypothesis Before Running a MMM Read More »
If you’re freezing coefficients in your media mix model, your model is broken. It’s one of the most common, and damaging, shortcuts in MMM. Something looks off in your results, so instead of investigating the cause, someone manually locks in a coefficient they “trust” and reruns the model until things …
Why Freezing Coefficients in an MMM is a Bad Practice Read More »
Garbage in, garbage out. If a media mix model has any chance of working, the model has to be fitted on high-quality, accurate data. Keep in mind: marketing mix models are holistic models operating at an aggregate level, not at an individual channel level. What that means is that if …
A common mistake in media mix modeling (MMM) is the belief that “more control variables are always better.” This mindset comes from treating statistical models as causality machines. The thinking goes: If we just input everything, we’ll get perfect causal inferences on the other side. That’s just not true. In …
Are Too Many Control Variables Damaging Your Media Mix Model? Read More »
Marketers often look for stability in their media mix models (MMM), assuming that if a model produces consistent results over time, it must be reliable. But stability alone doesn’t guarantee a good model. The real test isn’t whether an MMM produces the same results over time – it’s whether those …
Taking Your Media Mix Models from Stable to Truly Robust Read More »
The marketing measurement space has seen a surge in open-source marketing mix modeling (MMM) tools like Google’s Meridian and Meta’s Robyn. As an MMM vendor, we love this. It has brought in more people to consider MMM as part of their measurement mix and to start thinking about incrementality as …
Running an Open-Source MMM Is Easy. Trusting Its Results Is Hard. Read More »
The most dangerous media mix model (MMM) isn’t the one that’s obviously wrong—it’s the one that looks right but quietly misleads you. A model can perfectly match past sales trends while being completely wrong about why those trends happened. That’s because internal validation metrics like RMSE, MAPE, and R-squared can …
Why Internal Validation Metrics Are the Wrong Way to Judge Your MMM Read More »
What should companies doing (or thinking about doing) media mix modeling beware of? At Recast, we’ve seen the biggest MMM challenges fall into three major categories: Let’s break down why these issues are so difficult—and how they can be solved. 1. Diminishing Returns: Why More Spend ≠ More Results One …
