Digital Marketing Academy · Lesson

MMM vs Attribution

Top-down vs bottom-up.

Two Lenses on the Same Question

Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) and multi-touch attribution (MTA) both try to answer "what drove sales?" but from opposite directions.

MMM is top-down: it uses aggregate, time-series spend and sales data to estimate each channel's contribution. MTA is bottom-up: it stitches together individual user touchpoints toward a single conversion.

Advanced practitioners use both, knowing each has blind spots the other partially covers.

What MMM Actually Measures

MMM regresses sales against marketing and non-marketing drivers over time. It produces channel-level elasticities and a decomposition of sales into base and incremental contributions.

Crucially, MMM captures offline channels (TV, radio, OOH) and long-term effects that user-level tracking cannot see.

sales_t = base
        + b1*TV_t
        + b2*Search_t
        + b3*Social_t
        + b4*OOH_t
        + seasonality_t
        + error_t

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