❓ "Why are the ROI estimates for social media ads so different, when looking at Google Analytics 4, MMM, and ad platform reports?"
Attached picture is something you might see when you analyse the effectiveness of social media ads by comparing ROI estimates from different sources. Why does it look like this?
👉 Google Analytics 4 typically underestimates the ROI of social: Its attribution model (last-click or DDA) is often favouring marketing activities that are close to conversion, such as branded search.
👉 Ad platform typically overestimates its own ROI: Due to limitations in the attribution approach, it captures conversions that would have happened without marketing and conversions that were driven by other media.
👉 MMM's ROI estimate for social media ads is often somewhere between GA4 and ad platform, although the relationship between the three can vary a lot depending on the case. MMM's ROI estimate aims at capturing the true incrementality of social media ads. Modern MMMs also use calibration with incrementality tests to further increase accuracy of ROI estimates.
Since many performance marketing teams are used to looking at GA4 and ad platform reports, our approach at Sellforte is to show the three metrics side by side in our Marketing Mix Modeling dashboard.
