Smarter Investments for an Evolving Marketing Landscape: MMM Meta-Analysis with Monks and TikTok

The stakes are higher in 2025. Budgets are tighter and performance is under the microscope, and CMO-CFO alignment is especially critical when economic conditions are in flux. Without the right tools, it’s challenging to back up each marketing channel’s impact on revenue and profitability, making it hard to adapt quickly and confidently to budget cuts or new goals. Traditionally Media Mix Modeling (MMM) methodology has helped address these challenges, but it’s also been considered too slow, expensive, or brand-focused for performance-driven marketers. For the first time, AI is making MMM more accessible compared to legacy measurement tooling with high costs and long onboarding periods. Solutions like Monks’ Clarity use AI to help brands break past click-only attribution, turning complex data into strategic direction before ads even go to market.

To quantify how much brands could be leaving on the table without MMM, Monks partnered with TikTok for a meta-analysis of ad performance across a cohort of ecommerce and retail brands. This report breaks down the huge deltas between the last-click attributed conversions captured by web analytics and the true impact of channels like TikTok.

We partnered with TikTok to analyze MMM output models from 2023-2024 across a cohort of ecommerce brands to quantify the growth opportunities uncovered by MMM. Our analysis offers a comparative view across multiple retail segments (from fashion to consumer electronics to CPG), funnel strategies, and campaign objectives, to quantify the impact TikTok advertising had on each brand’s bottom line, and guide smarter budgeting decisions that maximize sales.

The brands we analyzed had previously used pixel-based attribution as the source of truth for marketing impact. However, we found that across the cohort pixel and click data consistently undervalued TikTok’s ROI by 50% or more compared to MMM. The downstream effect of the TikTok investment was not being captured effectively by cookie-based attribution, undercutting its role in generating sales.

When consumers tighten their belts, pulling out of an effective marketing channel because pixel data undercredits its impact is a recipe for losing market share. Yet many marketers still build their business cases for ad budget on measurement strategies that over-credit the last click, overlooking the broader funnel impact. MMM captures the broader effects that traditional attribution misses, for a more accurate view of performance.

Response curves are one of MMM’s most practical outputs, identifying the point of diminishing returns for a channel. They offer more than just ROI snapshots: response curves are the foundation of data-driven scenario planning. The inflection points show advertisers where to scale, when to pause, and how to prioritize advertising budget across the entire buying journey.

Using the cohort’s historical data, we highlighted the inflection point between efficient growth and overspending, defining the optimal advertising investment range for their TikTok programs. For one consumer electronics brand, the response curve showed that while total profit (y-axis) kept growing with increased spend, net profit (response curve inflection point) peaked at approximately three times the current TikTok ad investment.

Recognizing clear growth potential, the brand increased their TikTok investment by 171% from 2023 to 2024. While ROI typically plateaus or declines with significant budget increases, TikTok continued to deliver as a top-performing channel. At scale, TikTok surpassed the advertiser’s ROI on other social platforms by 23% and on other video channels by 90%. With MMM insights like this, brands can build statistically robust business cases for continued growth, allowing them to scale with confidence.

No channel exists in a silo, and budget changes often require pulling from one channel to another. Scenario planning powered by MMM helps marketers to evaluate how different channels perform at varying levels of spend, all within the same context. For a personal care brand, we modeled TikTok and other digital ad channels side by side. Our analysis showed that TikTok delivered 14% higher ROAS than other social and video advertising channels at similar spend levels, a drastically different picture than the brand’s site analytics showed with last-touch attribution.

Since response curves quantify the inflection point at which a given channel will stop outperforming others, they help marketers extract the most value from every channel by investing up to—but not past—the point of diminishing returns. MMM-informed scenario planning helps marketers quantify the interplay between channels, rather than just per-channel performance. An effective scenario planning output, such as the one illustrated in the graphic below, guides brands to the smartest investment possible for the strongest blended ROI. With a media mix that’s built to grow the business, not just perform in attribution models, marketers can navigate change with confidence and get buy-in on the ad investment with finance and executives.

While marketers hold full-funnel strategies as the gold standard in theory, in practice advertisers often find themselves stuck in one of two scenarios:

1. Bottoms-up blockages: Advertisers who build a foundation with lower-funnel campaigns will often aim to layer in mid- and upper-funnel tactics to scale further once they achieve stable performance. Yet without a business case centered on clicks or conversions as the primary KPIs, many struggle to quantify how these investments will impact the bottom line, or struggle to measure in real time if higher-funnel campaigns are “working.”
2. Cutting off the faucet: Although some advertisers may start with full-funnel ad strategies, many trim back to focus only on bottom-funnel tactics when budgets get cut. But investing solely in campaigns with conversion objectives turns off the metaphorical faucet that’s feeding those “top performer” campaigns, and performance eventually declines.

MMM can solve this gap by helping brands hold their digital media accountable to KPIs beyond clicks and pixel-attributed conversions. Across the client data we analyzed, TikTok consistently demonstrated greater conversion efficiency when brands combined Conversion campaigns with  Reach, Video View, Traffic, etc. campaigns, compared to brands who invest in Conversion campaigns alone. Across the board, full-funnel TikTok strategies with multiple campaign objectives ranged from 13% to 26% better ROAS than TikTok programs that only used conversion campaigns.

These results suggest that TikTok’s true impact emerges when brands move beyond treating brand and performance as separate objectives. Effective full-funnel strategies begin with Reach and Video View campaigns alongside Traffic and Landing Page View optimizations to generate qualified demand early, and make lower-funnel Conversion campaigns more efficient and scalable. MMM quantifies efficiencies like this that are not visible with pixel attribution, making it easier to optimize the entire campaign mix for holistic growth.

Without MMM, marketers risk putting some of their most effective acquisition tactics on the chopping block, or never testing them in the first place—leaving room for competitors to come in and generate demand in their absence. Yet most marketers are still relying on tools that over-credit the last click, leaving a gap in their measurement strategy, because MMM has been seen as too slow and too expensive. Monks is changing this narrative with AI-powered MMM solutions that break down the barriers to sophisticated measurement. Now, MMM is accessible and actionable for brands of all sizes thanks to tools like Clarity.

As part of our proprietary Monks.Flow technology, Clarity eliminates guesswork by using AI simulations to forecast performance, optimize media investments, and ensure smarter budget allocation. In Monks’ testing, Clarity has helped brands identify opportunities to increase profit from their marketing investments by up to 30%.

With econometric expertise powered by AI, marketers are able to:

• Plan with precision and proactivity. Forecast outcomes in distinct scenarios instead of being reactive.
• Avoid waste. Identify diminishing returns and invest only where it’s incremental.
• Earn buy-in from the CFO. Tie media efforts to profit, not just clicks.
• Lead with confidence. Use insights to guide smarter decisions across teams.

Clarity turns measurement into real-time strategy, unlike traditional MMM tools that require long setup times. It’s designed to help marketers not only understand performance now—with integrations like ChatGPT and Co-Pilot, so teams can ask plain-language questions of their data—but also predict future outcomes and act on them. When combined with TikTok’s Events API (eAPI), which helps brands capture more reliable and comprehensive conversion data beyond last-click attribution, marketers are able to make smarter real-time decisions that reflect true business impact. With deep expertise in activating measurement solutions like MMM, TikTok’s eAPI, and more, Monks is proud to partner with TikTok to help brands implement this technology. By advancing their measurement strategy, we help advertisers unlock more value from their digital media.

With the right technology to guide investment, marketers can confidently navigate change and thrive in an evolving digital landscape—no matter what the future brings.