Marketers face major barriers in measuring campaign success. Privacy regulations are mounting, Google has given consumers the choice to opt out of third-party cookies, and an expanding array of digital channels make tracking the customer journey difficult.
Heading into 2025, two tactics are gaining traction among marketers looking to boost campaign measurement and optimization—media mix modeling (MMM) and attention metrics. Here’s why.
MMM will be a critical component of marketers’ measurement strategies
MMM is a statistical analysis method that determines the impact of different marketing channels on sales or other business metrics.
Because it doesn’t rely on user-level data, MMM is a privacy-safe way for brands to get a “big picture” view of the effect paid media has on the bottom line.
“We're using [MMM] for high-level media planning and budgeting,” Echo Sandburg, chief brand officer, CP Skin Health Group US, said on a recent “Behind the Numbers” podcast. “It helps us better understand the impact of our marketing actions and what is driving the most effectiveness and efficiency, which I believe it's important to understand.”
2025 outlook: Marketers will rely more on MMM as user-based data like third-party cookies becomes harder to collect.
Because MMM doesn’t provide granular data, brands must combine it with other measurement methods, said Sandburg.
“It’s critical to supplement this work with more modern ways of understanding our marketing mix,” she said. “Particularly with digital and support that with more real-time learnings, with multi-touch attribution, which gives us that ability to help measure in much greater detail like how our targeting strategies or a creative is performing.”
Marketers turn their attention to attention metrics
MMM answers where marketers should focus their campaigns, while attention metrics assess how effectively they’re engaging consumers.
Traditional engagement metrics like impressions or clicks have been criticized for their superficiality. But attention metrics can measure tangible factors like time spent on creative, gaze tracking, and audio engagement, offering a richer understanding of ad performance.
“Attention metrics are super important because a lot of other metrics that are used as a proxy for attention are easily gained, inefficient, and flatten content in a way that I think is really bad for high-quality content producers,” said our analyst Max Willens on another “Behind the Numbers” podcast episode.
2025 outlook: Adoption of attention metrics will continue to rise.
But expect advertisers to focus on the channels that prove worth the considerable investment in attention metrics.
This was originally featured in the EMARKETER Daily newsletter. For more marketing insights, statistics, and trends, subscribe here.