Why More Than Data Uses Media Spend (Not Impressions or Clicks) for Marketing Mix Modelling

Introduction: The Problem with Vanity Metrics in Marketing Measurement

In today's complex digital marketing landscape, businesses are bombarded with countless performance metrics - impressions, clicks, view-through rates, and engagement scores. Yet at More Than Data, we've made a deliberate, research-backed decision to build our Marketing Mix Modelling (MMM) solutions exclusively using media spend data as the foundational input.

This article explains why we consider media spend the most reliable, actionable, and fraud-resistant metric for marketing effectiveness analysis, while other commonly used metrics often lead marketers astray with vanity numbers that don't correlate with business outcomes.

The Critical Limitations of Alternative Metrics

Impression Data: The Illusion of Reach

Many platforms boast about impression counts, but these metrics suffer from:

• No standardization across channels (a TV "impression" ≠ digital "impression")
  
• Viewability issues (many served impressions are never actually seen)
  
• Bot traffic contamination (up to 30% of digital impressions are fraudulent)
  
• No connection to business outcomes (high impressions don't guarantee sales)

Click Metrics: The Engagement Mirage

While clicks seem like a strong engagement signal, they're problematic because:

• Click farms artificially inflate numbers (we've seen agencies use hundreds of devices to fake engagement)
  
• Accidental clicks account for up to 50% of mobile ad clicks
  
• No correlation with conversions (high CTR campaigns doesn't mean high ROAS)
  
• Platform manipulation (some platforms optimize for clicks rather than real business results)

View-Through and Other Proxy Metrics

Other commonly used metrics fail because:

• Attribution windows are arbitrarily set by platforms
  
• Cross-device tracking is fundamentally broken
  
• Organic vs. paid impact can't be separated unless properly tracked
  
• Platforms mark their own homework with self-reported numbers

Compelling Reasons We Use Media Spend as Our Core Metric

1. Spend Data is Easier to Collect and Verify

For media agencies and marketers:

• Spend records exist in financial systems (not platform dashboards)
  
• Easily auditable through invoices and payment records
  
• Standardized across channels ($100 on TV = $100 on digital)
  
• No technical tracking requirements unlike impression/click data

2. Spend Directly Relates to Business Outcomes

Unlike intermediate metrics:

• Spend represents actual investment (input) that drives results (output)
  
• Directly connects to financial planning and ROAS calculations
  
• Eliminates vanity metric distractions that don't impact the bottom line
  
• Aligns with how businesses actually budget and make decisions

3. Spend is the Only Fraud-Resistant Metric

Our investigations found:

• Impressions/clicks can be faked at scale (and often are)
  
• Spend is nearly impossible to falsify without committing financial fraud
  
• Historical examples (like the MediaCom scandal) show spend manipulation is rare and high-risk
  
• Financial controls naturally audit spend data integrity

4. Avoids Problematic Assumptions About Media Efficiency

Using impressions requires:

• Assuming constant CPMs across channels/time (never true)
  
• Estimating viewability rates (highly variable)
  
• Trusting platform-reported reach (often inflated)
  
• Creating "equivalency" metrics that distort reality
  

5. Provides Clean Incrementality Measurement

Spend-based modelling:

• Clearly separates baseline vs. incremental growth
  
• Accounts for market saturation effects
  
• Models diminishing returns robustly
  
• Captures reasonable media effectiveness

How More Than Data's Approach Solves Industry Challenges

Simplifying the Data Collection Burden

Our clients appreciate that we only require:

• Media spend by channel/campaign
  
• Business outcome metrics (sales, leads, etc.)
  
• Basic market context data

No need to:

✔️ Chase impression reports from 20+ platforms
✔️ Reconcile conflicting attribution methodologies
✔️ Clean bot-contaminated engagement data

Delivering Transparent, Auditable Models

Unlike "black box" solutions:

• Every dollar is accounted for
  
• Results can be validated against financial records
  
• No hidden assumptions about media efficiency
  
• Clear ROAS calculations

Focusing on What Actually Matters

We help clients:

• Stop obsessing over vanity metrics
  
• Make budget decisions based on financial impact
  
• Optimize for profit, not intermediate metrics
  
• Align marketing with overall business goals

Minute MMM: Our Simple, Spend-Based Solution

Testimonial from our client

"After struggling with overly complex MMM solutions that required endless reports and still delivered questionable results, Minute MMM was a revelation. By focusing solely on media spend - data we already had clean and accessible - More Than Data delivered actionable insights in hours, not weeks. The simplicity is genius - no more guessing about viewability rates or questioning click validity. Just clear, spend-based recommendations that actually improved our ROAS. It's the first marketing measurement tool our finance team fully trusts."

The Results Speak for Themselves

Clients using our spend-based approach achieve:

• 30-50% faster implementation vs. non-spend based models
  
• Higher confidence in results from leadership teams
  
• Clearer optimization guidance
  
• Better alignment between marketing and finance