Leveraging MTA with MMM
How to Leverage MTA and MMM Together
Diversified marketing measurement is a growing need for brands with a complex marketing mix, who require different types of measurement to best understand performance across channels and make the most educated decision.
However, as you begin leveraging multiple forms of measurement it can become difficult to identify how to best leverage each and when you should be using them together.
See below for common questions and suggestions on leveraging both to make smarter marketing decisions
Should MTA and MMM results align?
MTA and MMM numbers should (and will) be different in most cases because they are different measurement methodologies leveraging different datasets.
MTA is a bottoms-up analysis that focuses on the user-level path to conversion, identifying each touchpoint along the user journey. This requires the ability to track each type of touchpoint.
MMM is a top-down analysis that looks at the correlation between spend, non-paid marketing, and external factors against an outcome variable (typically revenue) over a historical period (typically 2 years)
As these are different analyses, you should plan on using them differently - instead of reconciling them, lean into where they each shine and work with your Rockerbox team on how their results can inform each other (along with any testing efforts you may be conducting in-platform).
When should I use each?
When to use MMM
- Overview: MMM should be used for high-level budget allocation across channels and tactics, including understanding diminishing returns by channel
- Cadence: Monthly or Quarterly based on your budgeting processes
- Who typically leverages: CMO or leadership determining budget allocation
- Other notable call outs: MMM is great for measuring the impact of hard to track channels like offline (influencer, TV, etc.) and walled gardens; zero in on these channels to better drive spend allocation
When to use MTA
- Overview: MTA is tactical in nature, allowing you optimize within channels leveraging granular performance data. You can leverage path to conversion data to understand where channels work the hardest and their role in the funnel
- Cadence: Daily, Weekly, Monthly
- Who typically leverages: Channel Managers, Directors
- Other notable call outs: MTA has the granularity of performance that MMM does not provide insight into, lean into this with spend allocation decisions within channels
How to use MTA, MMM, and testing efforts together
Using together:
- Use MMM to set your budgets on a monthly and quarterly basis
- Use MTA to allocate the budget set by MMM within a given channel
Informing each other:
- You can provide the Rockerbox team the results of your in-channel lift and incrementality tests to inform priors for MMM modeling
- You can leverage Rockerbox's credit distribution feature to adjust MTA weights based on MMM results (i.e. for channels difficult to track at user level, but MMM validates strong performance)