Case Studies > GetYourGuide
GetYourGuide is a complex business, operating in many countries with a broad mix of paid media channels, and in October 2023, they onboarded Recast MMM to gain a holistic view of marketing’s true, incremental impact.
Recast has since become a central platform for GetYourGuide to understand media performance across their markets, form an experimentation roadmap and take an iterative approach to planning future marketing investments.

GetYourGuide is a Berlin-based marketplace for professional tours, excursions, and other activities or, in other words, for unforgettable travel experiences. Active worldwide, the company currently offers more than 150,000 experiences in 12,000+ cities.
GetYourGuide has expanded rapidly since they were founded in 2009, which has presented challenges to measuring marketing’s incremental impact. These challenges have been compounded by the nature of GetYourGuide’s business: they operate in many countries, are a two-sided marketplace, and invest in a broad mix of paid media channels.
In October 2023, GetYourGuide onboarded Recast MMM to gain a holistic view of marketing’s incremental impact on their business. They also brought on Dr. Vladislav Borisov – or Vlad, as we know him – to lead their marketing experimentation team and guide their use of Recast’s incrementality platform.
Vlad has deep experience in marketing science and statistical modeling (he previously worked on the measurement teams at adidas, MediaCom and Mindshare) which has made him a natural fit and “power user” of Recast.
Under Vlad’s watch, Recast has become GetYourGuide’s central platform for understanding media performance across markets, planning marketing investments, and forming a 2025 “Learning Agenda”: their experimentation roadmap for the coming year.
But, like with any new approach to measurement, getting GetYourGuide to really use Recast required building significant trust in the platform. To address this, GetYourGuide put a strong emphasis on modeling transparency, statistical rigor, and continuous validation of MMM output as part of their plan for rolling out an MMM to the organization.
Building Trust Through Rigor
It’s trivially easy to run data through a media mix model. What is exceptionally hard, however, is to build a model that identifies true causal signals between marketing performance and a key business outcome.
For this reason, we often say that practitioners should be “default skeptical” of their model’s results. Trust should be earned through statistical rigor, model validation, and transparency in modeling assumptions and performance.
The GetYourGuide team shares these values and makes sure to put all of their Recast models through their paces before making decisions with them. At Recast, we love this! During this process, the GetYourGuide team heavily uses a few of Recast’s core features.
1) In-platform backtests: Every Recast dashboard comes with built-in out-of-sample forecast accuracy reports. They update every week and do a few key things for the GetYourGuide team:
- They hold Recast accountable to a continuous model performance standard and allow for quick iteration if there are any model specification issues.
- They help the GetYourGuide team build trust that their models are capable of consistently predicting the future, before they make decisions with them.
Vlad explains this best:

2) Refresh cadence: GetYourGuide updates Recast MMM every week, taking advantage of the platform’s on-demand cadence.
On one level, this allows the platform to keep pace with GetYourGuide’s marketing teams and dynamically adapt to changes in marketing performance. That is, as channel ROIs change over time, these shifts are captured by Recast in real-time and inform future model refreshes.
But at a higher level, this fast refresh cadence becomes a powerful accountability mechanism. It prevents Recast from “hiding” poor model results behind a lack of timely refreshes.

3) Platform transparency: The GetYourGuide team also values Recast’s transparency. In addition to publishing backtest performance and modeling assumptions, Recast also exposes model uncertainty throughout its dashboard.
Under the hood, Recast is powered by a Bayesian time series model, which means there is uncertainty associated with all model estimates. It would be easy to hide this uncertainty in pursuit of exact ROI or CPA estimates, but instead, Recast exposes the uncertainty throughout the app for all parameter estimates.
This comes from our core belief that it’s crucial to understand model uncertainty when making budget decisions and building an effective channel experimentation roadmap.

The data science team at GetYourGuide uses all of these features – backtests, on-demand refreshes, and platform transparency – to build trust in Recast and gain conviction in the decisions they make with the platform.
Putting Recast Into Action: Insights and Reporting
The Recast platform, powered by Recast MMM and Recast GeoLift, is extensive. It has reports and tools for practitioners of all levels, from channel managers to PhD data scientists.
Vlad and the GetYourGuide team are extensive users of the platform and use Recast’s entire library of reporting and optimization tools. What does this look like in practice?
They start with Recast’s Insights dashboards and associated reports, the backwards-looking portions of the platform. Insights provides the GetYourGuide team views into their overall and channel-specific marketing efficiency, including saturation curves, time shifts, marginal ROIs, and more.
GetYourGuide uses these reports to understand the incrementality of all of their marketing channels on an apples-to-apples basis, and view channel-specific seasonality and organic demand over time.

These reports have helped the GetYourGuide team uncover a few key learnings. Notably, they identified that they were concentrating too much spend into large channels in Germany, one of their largest markets, and had potential to leverage a broader mix of smaller paid media channels.

Putting Recast into Action: Optimization
The GetYourGuide team also uses Recast’s Optimizer, a powerful scenario-analysis and planning tool that determines optimal channel budgets while handling different inputs like budget flighting, changing price levels and/or promotional calendars.
In practice, Vlad receives an overall marketing budget from his executive team and runs this through the Optimizer to generate initial budget plans for each of GetYourGuide’s markets. He also makes sure that the overall budget is sufficient to meet their marketing objectives.
From here, Vlad and GetYourGuide’s marketing teams begin an iterative process that follows these broad steps:
- Vlad assigns each marketing channel a portion of the business’s total marketing budget.
- Marketing teams, together with their agencies, create an initial media mix plan and submit it back to Vlad.
- Vlad runs these plans through the Optimizer, forecasts their expected performance, and communicates any budget shift opportunities back to each of the marketing teams.
- The marketing teams revise their budget mix plans based on Recast’s insights and their knowledge of channel dynamics, and submit them back to Vlad.
This process continues until each of GetYourGuide’s marketing teams have a media mix they’re confident in and clear marketing performance goals to work towards.
Planning 2025 with Recast
GetYourGuide’s use of Recast goes well beyond day-to-day reporting and optimizations. The platform has been key for developing GetYourGuide’s 2025 paid media budget plans and creating their “Learning Agenda”, an experimentation roadmap that includes a prioritized list of test channels and testing budgets.
A common thread in GetYourGuide’s future planning has been the uncertainty that Recast exposes in-app. It’s allowed the GetYourGuide team to understand which marketing channels have high amounts of uncertainty associated with their measurement, so that they can prioritize them for experimentation in their 2025 Learning Agenda.
Understanding uncertainty also helps GetYourGuide’s marketing teams stay on the same page with their executives while planning budgets and marketing goals. They can communicate ranges of potential marketing outcomes, instead of relying on point estimates, and can flag any channels that have relatively high amounts of uncertainty. This allows them to set realistic expectations with the executive team, so that they aren’t set up for failure in future quarters.

GetYourGuide has a clear and confident marketing strategy for 2025, complete with media plans for each of their markets and a robust Learning Agenda. So what does their future look like with Recast?
Soon, GetYourGuide will build models for their French and Italian markets, and are excited to continue upleveling their measurement ability throughout the business.
Do you have a complex media mix like GetYourGuide and think your business is ready for Recast’s incrementality platform? We’d love to talk.