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Marketing Dashboard FAQ

How should I interpret the difference between MMM and Google Analytics reported numbers?

Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) aims to report the true incrementality of your media spend.
Google Analytics, on the other hand, reports attribution — it assigns credit to channels but does not indicate how much of that impact was truly incremental.

Because of this fundamental difference, it is expected to see significant discrepancies between MMM results and Google Analytics numbers.

Example:
Google Analytics may show Google Search Brand as highly efficient. However, not all brand searches are incremental or driven by ads. Many customers already know your brand and would visit your website even if they had not seen a brand ad. MMM adjusts for this and only credits the incremental portion of impact.

How promotion-driven sales are measured

Sellforte’s Marketing Mix Modeling identifies promotion-driven sales by analyzing historical sales patterns alongside promotional activity data.

  • Promotional activity is provided to the model as daily inputs, reflecting when promotions were active and how strong they were.

  • The model evaluates how changes in promotional intensity have historically influenced total sales.

  • Based on these patterns, MMM separates:

    • baseline sales

    • promotion-driven uplift

    • media-driven incremental impact

In the Sellforte UI, promotion-driven sales are shown as a separate component, making it easy to understand:

  • how much sales uplift came from promotions

  • how promotion impact evolved over time

Unlike attribution tools, MMM can explicitly disentangle the effect of promotions from the effect of media. This is especially valuable during high-promotion periods such as Black Week or seasonal peaks, when both discounts and media activity increase simultaneously.

How investments are allocated to Own Channels

Defining investments for Own Channels (such as email or SMS) differs from paid media, as these channels typically do not have a direct spend per send.

In most implementations, Sellforte uses a proxy-based approach to reflect the relative scale of Own Channel activity:

  • When available, data from platforms such as GA4 or Klaviyo is used to observe the sales value attributed to email or SMS.

  • A common approach is to estimate spend as 10% of the attributed sales value.

  • This proxy reflects operational and resource investment and provides a consistent input over time.

Example:

  • Email is attributed 100 USD in sales by the platform

  • Proxy spend is defined as 10% → 10 USD

  • MMM determines that 50% of the attributed sales were truly incremental

Result:

  • Incremental sales: 50 USD

  • Spend: 10 USD

  • Incremental ROAS: 5

This approach allows MMM to consistently evaluate Own Channels even without explicit spend data.