Smarter Budgeting Ahead: Google’s New Meridian Updates and What They Mean for Advertisers
As digital marketers, we live and die by the metrics that we believe. Therefore, when Google extends new functionality to its Meridian marketing mix model (MMM) you might want to pay attention. These enhancements are focused on more accurately measuring ad campaign performance, and at the same time becoming more informed and actionable. For South African brands and others, this represents a shift in what we utilise to spend ad spend and measure campaign effectiveness.
In this article some of these updates will be unpacked, showcasing how they might affect your strategy, as well as other tips on how Fuzion Digital is prepared to leverage these for clients.
A Brief Refresher: What is Meridian?
Meridian is Google’s open-source marketing mix modelling tool, launched in January 2025 and now available to all marketers.
Unlike most opaque attribution tools, Meridian offers transparency, flexibility, and the ability to combine data from a huge variety of sources. It allows you to estimate the incremental impact of all channels, both online and offline, so that you can make more informed marketing budget decisions.
What’s New: The Latest Enhancements to Meridian
Google recently rolled out updates that enhance Meridian’s capabilities and usability. Check out the top additions below:
- Non-Media Variables: Pricing & Promotions
Advertisers can now feed non-media variables such as the cost of a product, promotional efforts and discounts to calculate how much more precisely they add up to sales.
Your model can reflect real-world realities! Therefore, when you run a promotion, for example, the model can isolate more precisely how much of the sales bump was due to the promo and how much was due to the media spend.
- Channel-Level Contribution Priors
You then get to guide the model by giving priors such as sensible estimates of how much each channel is contributing to your KPI.
That then gives you a way to blend domain expertise (your knowledge of your industry) into the stats model for more valuable insights.
- Longer-Term Effects: Brand Recall & Influence
One of the issues with most attribution tools is that they have a short time horizon. Meridian’s updates include enhanced binomial adstock decay functions so you can visualise how spend on upper-funnel media (brand, awareness, reach) drives conversions weeks down the road.
That is, it considers the marketing that plants seeds whose effect is realised at some future point in time.
- Smarter Marginal ROI Priors
The updates include marginal ROI priors to help you determine where the next rand (or dollar) will pay back most, according to past trends of performance.
This allows for smarter budget reallocation, favoring those channels making incremental contributions over mere scaling of what’s working.
Why These Updates Matter for Your Ad Strategy
It’s simple enough to buy a new tool, but it is difficult to comprehend how it will influence your decisions. Here is how this translates to the real world.
Improved attribution
Most marketers can’t untangle the interplay of media spend, price strategy, external promotions and seasonality. These enhancements enable you to separate out those signals, giving you better insight into what actually drives conversions.
Brand and performance bridged
By factoring in the lag effect and impact at the top of the funnel, you are able to describe and optimise brand investment rather than treat it as an unquantifiable expenditure.
Leverage human judgment and date
Prior introduction leaves you with a hybrid framework in terms of statistical integrity, but room for human judgment. You can encourage the algorithm to make more realistic assumptions rather than giving over total control to a black box.
Optimise where the next rand goes
With mROI priors, not only are you optimising the past, but you are also adjusting for the future, budgeting to where it’ll most likely be incremental.
Improved ad performance diagnostics
The Performance Max segmentation upgrades allow you to drill down on exactly what assets, devices or conversion types are really driving. This helps you cut out underperformers or reallocate creative assets.
How to Prepare & Get Ahead
The following are things you can do today so you’ll be fully ready when you put these features into practice:
Clean your data and infrastructure
Quality historical data such as sales, media, promotions, price and external factors, is usually what these models require. Make sure you have clean, consolidated datasets in hand.
Test assumptions with priors
Start constructing channel priors (expected contribution shares) from history, industry norms or your own local knowledge. Use them as starting points in models.
Perform incrementality tests
Use A/B or geo-lift tests to validate your priors. By doing so your model assumptions rely on controlled facts.
Iterate with scenarios
Test different spend allocations in the scenario planner (if you have one) and stress test what if models. Examples could include: what if I cut spend there, or add here?
Roll out in stages
Start to put this into practice on a single brand, region or cluster of campaigns. Put the learnings into practice before scaling up.
Partner with Fuzion Digital to Make Every Campaign Count
Google’s latest Meridian upgrades are not incremental tweaks, but they rather bring MMM closer to the vision of bringing together transparency, control and actionable insight. For innovative brands and agencies, this offers a deeper foundation for budgeting, confirming long-term effectiveness and optimising every rand.
At Fuzion Digital, we are dedicated to marrying strategic insight with measurement innovation. We are already working behind the scenes to tie these updates together and build adaptive models for our clients!
Future campaign tracking isn’t more data: it’s smarter data, guided by insight, ready to serve your growth.
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