Meridian-based budgeting in Google Analytics helps you find optimal budget allocations across channels. It builds on your property’s historical cross-channel data to estimate how marketing spend affects key performance indicators (KPIs) such as revenue or conversions. It does not use attribution as an input, but instead looks at a property’s total conversions and cost data across advertising channels.
Meridian is an open-source marketing mix modeling (MMM) framework developed by Google. It provides a flexible, statistical foundation for measuring the causal impact of marketing efforts, response curves, and optimizing cross-channel budgets. Learn more about the Meridian and incremental attribution methodologies powering this tool.
With Meridian-based budgeting in Google Analytics 360, you can answer key questions like:
- How will the marketing impact vary with spend?
- How should we allocate our future budget to maximize our business outcome?
- What is the incremental impact of spending +X% next quarter on marketing?
On this page
Property eligibility
To use Meridian-based budgeting, consider the following requirements:
- Your Google Ads account must be linked to your Google Analytics property.
- Your property must have conversions created.
- You must import at least 2 years of campaign cost data. Learn more about importing campaign data.
- Your property must have at least 2 years of accumulated conversion and revenue data. Conversions are backfilled with event data when available.
How it works
Import sources, dimensions, and metrics
Cross-channel budgeting, powered by Meridian, uses data from your Google Analytics property, including aggregated campaign information from linked products and data imports, and offline data when available. Only paid channels are included in budgeting results, organic channels are not. Key metrics include:
- Ads cost: The total amount paid for ads.
- MMM Incremental Conversions (MMM iConversions): The conversions caused by the impact of ads, based on your MMM.
- MMM Incremental Cost per Conversion (MMM iCPA): How much, on average, each incremental conversion costs, based on your MMM.
- MMM Incremental Revenue: The revenue caused by the impact of ads, based on your MMM.
- MMM Incremental ROAS (MMM iROAS): The proportion of return only caused by the impact of ads from a given channel, based on your MMM.
Budgeting reports will help you compare your Projected channel spend vs. Optimized plan to help you reach your business goals.
- Projected shows what is expected to happen using a time-series forecast of your current spending patterns.
- Optimized tells you the optimal budget allocation per channel to achieve your goals, based on Meridian’s optimization engine.
- % change helps you quickly identify the expected impact of following the optimized plan, compared to what is projected to happen if you maintain your current allocation strategy.
Model methodology
Meridian-based budgeting is fundamentally powered by Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) methodology, and specifically, it uses Meridian as the optimization engine.
MMM is a durable, cross-channel measurement solution that helps measure marketing-driven incremental sales (vs. expected “baseline” revenue) over a longer time horizon. The model accounts for historical factors outside of ads, like seasonality or organic demand, that impact your business outcomes. MMM doesn’t rely on event-level attribution, and instead looks at aggregate trends, enabling you to see a holistic picture of your marketing efforts and compare impact across channels. This makes MMM an actionable long-term planning tool, empowering you to make data-driven budgeting decisions based on the true, or incremental, impact of your marketing.
Meridian is grounded in causal inference theory and uses Bayesian regression modeling to measure the impact of historical marketing activity. It combines prior knowledge of your aggregate conversions and sales data with patterns learned from campaign data to estimate media effects. This makes MMM more deterministic by integrating incrementality experiments as ROI-based priors, grounding the model’s assumptions in proven experimentation. The model in Google Analytics 360 uses incrementality estimates based on conversion lift studies and industry benchmarks.
Learn more about Meridian and incremental attribution methodologies.
Forecasting and response curves
Meridian models are trained on up to 2 years of historical data and produce response curves for each channel to understand how marketing impact changes with spend. To enable future plans, we use a time-series model to forecast spending patterns on a per-channel-basis, which helps account for seasonal trends. Based on the response curves and projected spend, Meridian estimates incremental conversions, revenue, and ROI for future time periods.
Budget optimization
Meridian’s optimization engine explores different ‘what if’ scenarios to understand the impact to your conversions or revenue at different budgets. This allows Meridian-based budgeting tools in Google Analytics to pinpoint the best recommended budget allocations to maximize ROI. You can use these recommendations to plan future campaigns or adjust in-flight budgets. The outputs are estimates and should be treated as guidance rather than guarantees