With tighter budgets and rising media costs, knowing what truly drives revenue is essential. Econometric modelling gives you the proof you need to invest your marketing budget with confidence and deliver stronger ROI.

“We’ve leveraged econometric insights to optimise media spend, resulting in significant ROI improvements and strategic growth.”

Lewis Kimber, Head of Acquisition and Trading

Econometrics is a powerful way to measure marketing effectiveness. It identifies how many incremental sales (or other KPIs) are driven by each part of your marketing mix.

Unlike other attribution methods (like spot matching, last-click, or survey-based techniques), econometrics measures all drivers, media and non-media alike, on a level playing field. It’s the only approach that shows the true impact of your activity, not just what’s easiest to track.

We use an advanced statistical process (multivariate linear regression) to analyse the relationships between multiple drivers, simultaneously. This helps us work out the contribution of each to your total sales.

At MetaMetrics, we have been long-term advocates of Bayesian analysis which is an even more advanced technique allowing us to extract even deeper insights from your data.

Econometric modelling is the only technique capable of disentangling all the many drivers of your KPIs. It’s most used to explain ‘hard’ metrics, such as sales, customer acquisition, and donations.

But it’s equally valuable for understanding the drivers behind other KPIs, like web visits, brand health metrics, service usage, and more.

In short, if you have continuous data over time for any measure of consumer response, it can likely be modelled.

A common misconception is that econometric modelling only measures the impact of media. While it can be used in this way, the results are only meaningful when we include all significant drivers of sales – both media and non-media.
What these drivers are will vary by brand, but could include:

• Market growth or decline
• Price changes
• Promotional activity
• Seasonality and weather
• Economic factors, such as interest rates, or consumer confidence
• Competitor activity

We refer to econometrics as ‘data agnostic’ – it doesn’t mind what kind of data it’s working with. It simply analyses patterns and correlations.

That’s why human interpretation is so important. Careful analysis helps ensure the results are accurate, reliable, and genuinely useful, something we focus on heavily at MetaMetrics.

A well-built model can help you:

• • Understand what truly drives your KPIs
  • Prove the financial impact of your marketing
  • Optimise your budget across channels
  • Simulate different spend scenarios for smarter planning
  • Get media-level recommendations to improve ROI
  • Measure brand-focused KPIs alongside hard metrics

Curious to learn more about how it works? 

Not every business is ready for an econometric project. That’s why we often spend time upfront with our clients exploring whether it’s the right fit.

This is a bigger topic than we can tackle here, but you might want to consider doing an econometric project if you have:

• A question about your media that you would like an answer for
• A budget to optimise
• A dataset to model