Running a Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) pilot is one of the most effective ways to demonstrate the business impact of data-driven marketing. Yet, achieving a successful outcome takes more than building a model, it requires clear goals, stakeholder alignment, and a structured approach to testing and scaling.
At Sellforte, we have conducted dozens of MMM pilot projects with eCommerce and retail brands. Over time, we have identified a repeatable set of MMM pilot best practices that consistently lead to better results.
This four-step framework will help you plan, run, and scale your MMM pilot successfully.
Every successful MMM pilot starts by defining why you are doing it.
As Eeva Karhu, Sellforte’s Head of eCom, explains:
“It should always start from the business goals. What are your targets for growth? Are you looking for new customers or driving more value from existing ones?”
Set growth-based objectives rather than focusing only on efficiency metrics. MMM delivers the most value when it links marketing activity to overall business performance, such as revenue, sales, or customer acquisition, not just channel ROI or cost per click.
Define your hypothesis early.
For example:
“Meta appears underperforming in GA4. Can MMM show its true incremental value?”
“We suspect TV drives more full-price sales than promotions. Can we quantify that?”
This goal-setting phase also includes onboarding your team, aligning stakeholders, and defining how success will be measured.
📅 Timeline: Week 1
🎯 Focus: Business objectives, hypotheses, data validation, and onboarding.
Once the foundation is in place, plan your test scenarios and decide how you will measure success throughout the pilot.
As Oskari Raunio, Customer Success Manager at Sellforte, notes:
“You need to plan ahead what is a good time period for testing, ideally something comparable to last year. Avoid low seasons or heavy promotion periods that make it hard to isolate MMM impact.”
Choose a realistic test window, typically 4–6 weeks, and determine which platforms and metrics are most important. Will you focus on incremental sales, total conversions, or internal KPIs?
Key tasks at this stage:
Monitor weekly changes in media mix impact.
Use dashboards or tracking tools to log adjustments.
Compare current performance against a baseline scenario.
📅 Timeline: Week 2
🎯 Focus: First results, UI training, and setting up scenario tracking.
By week three, you should begin implementing small but meaningful media optimizations based on MMM recommendations.
There are two main testing strategies:
Radical tests, such as pausing a major channel in one market to validate MMM predictions.
Incremental tests, which apply smaller changes across channels to test model sensitivity.
Most brands start with incremental tests to build confidence and validate the model’s accuracy before scaling changes.
Next, document everything; what was changed, why, and what impact it had. This evidence will be crucial for building a business case for wider MMM adoption.
Sellforte provides three products that make this process structured and data-driven:
1. Sellforte MMM Dashboard
Compare MMM, GA4, and ad platform results side by side to reveal underreported upper-funnel performance and identify hypotheses for testing.
2. Sellforte Optimizer
Model alternative media mix scenarios, forecast incremental sales, and identify scaling opportunities before reallocating budgets.
3. Sellforte Performance
Receive campaign-level recommendations based on the last 28 days of data, including budget adjustments and bidding tweaks, to validate optimizations in practice.
Together, these tools help you test, measure, and validate MMM recommendations, building both confidence and momentum across your organization.
📅 Timeline: Week 3
🎯 Focus: Implementing MMM recommendations, testing scenarios, documenting learnings.
The final step is to demonstrate measurable business impact and plan how to continue using MMM beyond the pilot.
By week four, you should be able to quantify the outcomes of your optimizations, calculate incremental impact, and present a business case for ongoing adoption. This is the stage where marketing insights turn into financial validation.
But success is not only about metrics. It is also about organizational alignment.
As Eeva explains:
“The pilot is often the first time teams see one unified, transparent measurement framework. It is not about comparison or blame. It is about collective improvement. MMM should be a learning loop for the marketing organization.”
To ensure long-term success:
Document the shift from attribution to MMM.
Train teams to interpret and act on MMM insights.
Secure executive buy-in for broader adoption.
📅 Timeline: Week 4
🎯 Focus: Validation, impact proofing, and planning for continuity.
A successful MMM pilot does not simply validate a model, it validates a new way of working.
When built on clear goals, transparent documentation, and continuous optimization, an MMM pilot becomes the foundation for long-term marketing effectiveness.
In summary:
Define your goals
Plan and track your impact
Optimize continuously
Demonstrate success and scale your results
Following these MMM pilot best practices will help you plan, run, and scale your project with confidence, and prove the real business value of marketing measurement.
Start with Marketing X-Ray from Sellforte — a complimentary MMM analysis that helps you identify smarter spend allocation and uncover the growth potential for your eCommerce and DTC sales.
It’s the perfect first step toward a successful MMM pilot.
Edward Ford is Marketing Director at Sellforte. He has over 15 years of marketing experience in B2B SaaS and Tech with specialization in marketing measurement and intelligence. Before joining Sellforte, Edward spent over 6 years at Supermetrics where he joined as an early-stage employee. Follow Edward on LinkedIn for more about marketing and growth.