3 Questions with Rockerbox: Why We Created MMM for Shopify

In late February we released MMM for Shopify—a game-changing measurement tool that can help marketers make more informed decisions about where to spend their budget for the best return on their investment.

For this blog, we sat down with one of the minds behind the MMM project, Rockerbox Head of Product Sameen Karim to learn more about this release and what it means for the future of marketing measurement.

Why did Rockerbox decide to release an MMM for Shopify solution and how does it help marketers?

Sameen: We released MMM for Shopify because we really understood the need in the market. With more and more marketers trying to understand how to maximize their budgets where every single dollar counts, it's more important than ever before to really understand what is the optimal budget level for each of your channels—so you can spend more on what matters, and you can cut back on the things that aren't really giving you your best return.

That's what MMM is really all about. It's really helping you understand at a macro level which of your marketing channels are most effective, and what is that optimal spend level that can get you your target ROAS and help you on the path to profitability.

MMM + MTA are stronger together—can you talk about why?

Sameen: Okay, so contrary to what a lot of people may think, MTA and MMM are actually very symbiotic. They can work together really, really well. Whereas MTA gives you that log-level, bottoms-up analysis, helping you understand at a granular level how each creative or ad is performing, MMM is that macro, top-down analysis that helps you understand at a high-level how your different channels are working and really helps you understand how you want to set your budgets at the top level.

So they work together really well because, for example, for someone who's a channel manager working within this particular channel, like Facebook or Google, it's really helpful to be able to see real-time data looking at how different creatives are performing so you can make those very small adjustments day to day, week to week, whereas MMM is really a much larger look at your marketing. That is really helpful for someone, maybe at the director level or someone who's overseeing multiple channels, really trying to understand how to set that optimal budget for each of their channels and tactics across all their marketing.

What's in the future for Rockerbox MMM?

Sameen: We're super excited to share even more with you in the coming months about MMM here at Rockerbox. We're already working on ways to get additional types of sales into the platform, such as from Amazon, retail, wholesale, or other ecommerce back ends, making sure that you can get all of your sales data in one place.

Additionally, we want to make sure that we can support all other types of marketing. So we've already rolled out support for all the major core digital platforms. We're going to be rolling out support for additional digital platforms—offline advertising, TV, direct mail, podcasts, you name it. So you can really make sure that MMM at Rockerbox really helps understand that true impact across all of your marketing spend and all of your sales.

Finally, and this is really important for us, typically, MMM has been a very difficult process, requiring a lot of custom work. Maybe the model is built once a year. We have started with monthly model refreshes and we're going to be increasing that frequency over time.

The goal really is to make it easy for you to access these models, to understand how your impact on marketing is changing over time, and making that just a very seamless automated process with a lot of usable insights that tell you exactly with guided recommendations on how you should be spending along with other integrations with the rest of the Rockerbox product suite. So, taking the output of a decision that you've made in a monthly budget planner from the MMM tool and using it to guide ad level optimizations inside views for the channel manager. So there's a lot more that we have in store and that's just scraping the surface.