6 Reasons eCommerce & DTC Brands Should Use Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM)

Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) adoption is at full speed among eCommerce businesses and DTC brands.

But why are they doing it? What are eCommerce businesses actually saying about MMM's benefits? Why did they decide to implement it, and why do they continue using it?

In this blog, I decided to investigate and answer these questions based on the feedback and comments of Sellforte's customers. As the data source, I used our recent Customer Happiness Survey, new customer announcements, case studies and discussions from customer calls. Let's dive in!

1) Understand the True Incremental Sales Impact of Media

This quote is from a press release announcing Horizn Studios as a new Sellforte customer and captures a key challenge many eCom businesses have: Last-Click attribution. In short, it's not sufficient for media spend optimization because it does not measure the true incremental sales impact of each channel.

When starting an eCommerce business, it's natural to measure media  effectiveness with attribution tools because they are free and easily available. That's why Google Analytics 4 Last-Click is still commonly used for cross-channel media measurement. However, when media budgets grow, Last-Click quickly leads companies to non-optimal spend allocation as it favors channels that are close to conversion and under measures channels earlier in the funnel. 

2) Optimize New Customer Acquisition and CAC

One of the reasons why we're excited to work with eCommerce and DTC brands is that they typically have very high growth ambitions. Their mindset is similar to Sellforte. The quote above is from a meeting where we discussed the main KPIs to be shown in Sellforte Home (the main dashboard within Sellforte) for the customer and highlights a typical challenge for high-growth brands: Optimizing New Customer Acquisition.

The only way to optimize new customer acquisition is to understand which channels are most effective in driving new customer revenue and which ones have room to scale. Marketing Mix Modeling can help with that. As an example, MMM can rank channels by average customer acquisition cost (CAC).

3) Optimize Spend During Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Other Major Events

eCommerce can be highly seasonal. In some categories, 70%+ of sales might happen during Black Friday and the holiday season. Appropriately pacing budget throughout the year can be a challenging task and a common mistake for highly seasonal eCom businesses is to under-invest during high seasons with lots of natural demand and over-invest in low seasons.

MMM helps brands find optimal spend allocation for each week. As an example output from MMM, the chart below shows historical spend by week on orange and Sellforte-optimized spend on the blue.

For another example of optimizing budget pacing throughout the year, you can check our case study with Represent Clothing on Black Friday. Using Sellforte, Represent was able to grow their media-driven sales during Black Friday by +44% by increasing spend in Paid Social. 

4) Measure the Full Funnel

eCom businesses using Last-Click attribution have many hidden heroes who never get the credit they deserve: Paid Social managers, YouTube marketers, brand managers and so on.

Why? By definition, Last-Click attribution only measures the final touch point before purchase. This means that it severely underestimates the effectiveness of top- and mid-funnel activities. As an example, typical multipliers from Last-Click reported ROAS to true ROI of media are:

• 2-9x for Meta channels 
• 17x for TikTok channels

MMM helps uncover these hidden heroes by revealing the true ROI of Paid Social, YouTube advertising, and brand campaigns.

5) Measure Digital Media Sales Impact on Physical Stores

Some eCommerce businesses and DTC brands operate physical stores in addition to the eCom store. In those cases, MMM helps to measure how digital media drives sales in physical stores. This was the case with Cris Barros, a Brazilian fashion company, as shown by the quote above.

6) Drive More Revenue and Profits

In our 2025 Customer Happiness Survey, we asked for the most significant benefits of Sellforte. 52% of respondents chose "Achieving actual monetary improvements". This highlights the fact that while measurement and increased transparency is important, ultimately the purpose of MMM for customers is to drive more revenue and profits through better media spend optimization.

We love this at Sellforte. The #1 value of our company is "IMPACT", the idea that everything we do should lead to tangible financial benefits for the customers.

Based on our research, MMM typically helps eComs achieve at least +6.5% more annual sales by optimizing spend across channels, spend across campaigns, and budget pacing throughout the year.

Conclusion: Why are eCom & DTC brands using Marketing Mix Modeling?

There's 6 main reasons why marketing leaders at eCommerce and DTC brands are using Marketing Mix Modeling:

1. Understand the True Incremental Sales Impact of Media
2. Optimize New Customer Acquisition and CAC
3. Optimize Spend During Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Other Major Events
4. Measure the Full Funnel
5. Measure Digital Media Sales Impact on Physical Stores
6. Drive More Revenue and Profits

If you're interested in exploring Marketing Mix Modeling -based measurement, Book a demo or Start a Free Trial.