• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer, 5 hours ago

Metrics give marketers insight into the impact of campaigns, but the power resides in understanding the numbers.

Google has released two AI-based agentic agents that analyze campaigns, but marketers should have the knowledge to recognize the influence of the words and images through marketing mix modeling (MMM). 

The company this week lowered the minimum requirement to run MMM incrementality testing. What once might have cost marketers more than $100,000 for one experiment can now be done for $5,000, the company wrote in a post earlier this week.

“This opens the door for many more businesses to embrace incrementality testing, proving the value of every marketing dollar,” said John Chen, senior director of product management and ads measurement at Google.

Along with bringing down the cost, updates to study settings around feasibility and conversion actions should give marketers more control of what is measured.

Google’s definition of conversion lift measures the actual number of conversions, site visits, and any other action driven by audiences viewing a company’s ads. This type of data, Google explains, can help marketers adjust and improve ads to generate more sales, leads and app installs.

The updates are designed to help advertisers measure the true, causal impact of their ads and what drives results in campaigns. This also provides insight into what does not drive results.

Improvements in how these tests work and use new statistical models should make results up to 50% more conclusive, Chen wrote. The new models should give marketers fewer inconclusive tests and clearer, more reliable insights.

The key is to combine MMMs with incrementality and attribution, because the integrated approach allows marketers to “calibrate and refine your MMMs with real-world experimental data, enhancing their accuracy,” Chen wrote.

Marketers have told Google that proving real-world value of marketing is a top priority. In fact, 80% of U.S. senior marketing analytics professionals reported that implementing insights from incremental experiments have a high impact on revenue growth, according to Google/BCG, a U.S. global measurement survey fielded between January 27 and February 15, 2025.