How Much Ad Spend Is Needed for Marketing Mix Modeling?

If your annual media spend is below $5 million, traditional Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) vendors might tell you that their service isn’t the right fit for you, because you're not big enough.

At first glance, this might seem reasonable—after all, traditional MMM platforms were built for high-level budget allocations decisions. In these situations you need large budgets for traditional MMM to be worth it.

But this is not the case for Next Gen Marketing Mix modeling platforms, such as Sellforte. We serve customers with annual media spend ranging from below $1 million to over $100 million.

How is that possible?

Why Sellforte Works for Advertisers with $1M of Ad Spend

It all comes down to business case math.

Let’s consider an eCommerce business with the following profile:

• $1M in annual ad spend (focused on digital channels)
• $10M in annual revenue

With $1M of spend on digital channels, Sellforte's annual price is $30k when writing this blog post (we have public pricing) .

By leveraging Sellforte’s platform, this eCom business can increase its sales by $650k without increasing its media budget. Here’s how:

1️⃣ + $160k: Optimizing budget allocation across different channels.
2️⃣ + $290k: Optimizing budget allocation at the campaign level.
3️⃣ + $200k: Optimizing budget pacing to ensure spend is distributed optimally each week.

Source for these benchmarks: From Last-click to MMM: Unlock +6.5% more sales .

That’s a 22x return on investment ($650k / $30k).

Even if the CFO would scrutinize this ROI and adjust it for gross margin and some executional uncertainty, the business case is clear: Sellforte delivers substantial value, even for a company with $1M in ad spend. Why? Because it covers all three key optimization levers.

Why Traditional MMMs Don't Recommend Their Service if You Have $1M Ad Spend

A traditional MMM platform focuses only on strategic media budget optimization—meaning they only help advertisers optimize their budget allocation across channels (lever 1️⃣).

If the same eCommerce business were to use a traditional MMM platform, its business case would look like this:

Optimization potential:+ $160k in incremental sales (from channel-level optimization)
ROI: 5x ($160k / $30k)

If in this case, the CFO would scrutinize the ROI calculation, traditional MMM's ROI might be closer to break-even. The picture below summarizes difference in ROI between Next Gen MMMs and traditional MMMs:

Conclusions

If you're an advertiser evaluating an MMM platform, always build a business case based on the specific optimization use cases the platform supports. Look for Next Gen MMM platform, like Sellforte, that provide tactical optimization of media budget, in addition to strategic budget optimization.

Want to try Sellforte? Apply for a free trial .