What is marketing mix modeling (MMM)?

Marketing mix modeling (MMM) is a statistical method that estimates how much each marketing channel contributes to sales, using aggregate historical data rather than individual user tracking. It looks at spend, sales, seasonality, and outside factors over time and models the relationships.

Why it is having a resurgence

Because MMM works on aggregate data, it does not depend on cookies, click ids, or tracking individual people. As privacy changes erode user-level tracking, brands are revisiting MMM as a way to measure channels that attribution struggles to see, like connected TV, podcasts, and offline media.

MMM vs attribution

The two answer different questions. Attribution tells you which specific clicks became specific sales, in near real time, and can feed conversions back to ad platforms. MMM tells you, at a strategic level, how channels influence total sales over months, including ones with no click to track. Attribution is a scalpel; MMM is a compass. Larger advertisers increasingly use both, plus incrementality tests to validate them.

Trakt focuses on the attribution side: complete, first-party, click-level measurement that also acts, by pushing recovered conversions back to Google and Meta.