As privacy regulations tighten and platform policies evolve, the availability of key data points traditionally used to inform digital advertising—such as cookies and user-level identifiers—has significantly decreased. This shift has created challenges for marketers who are finding it harder to accurately measure the return on investment (ROI) of their campaigns, allocate budgets effectively across channels, and optimize their media strategies to maximize sales.

In response to this growing challenge, there has been a surge in the adoption of Media Mix Models (MMMs) and Geolifts, solutions particularly favored by performance-driven advertisers who need reliable, privacy-compliant methods for measuring marketing effectiveness. Geolifts use statistical methodology to compare two groups—Control Group and Exposed Group—at a location level, analyzing a channel’s true performance in generating total sales. MMMs use statistical methodology to attribute incremental sales to a wide variety of factors including historical spend, promotions, and seasonality. Unlike other measurement solutions, both Geolifts and MMMs remain unaffected by changes in privacy regulations, making them resilient tools in an increasingly privacy-conscious world.

Geolifts provide the gold standard for measuring the true incrementality of marketing efforts. MMMs, when accurately calibrated by Geolifts, allow marketers to understand the saturation curve of each channel and further optimize media spend. Together, these integrated strategies provide enhanced granularity and accuracy, enabling marketers to assess the incremental impact of both online and offline media, uncover optimization opportunities, and refine their media planning processes with greater precision.

Waldo’s faced a challenge: they were unable to determine whether their investments in TikTok were driving meaningful results. Neither Google Analytics nor TikTok’s analytics were showing clear conversions from their marketing efforts, leaving the team in the dark about the effectiveness of their campaigns.

This uncertainty was exacerbated by the broader context of privacy changes, including the depreciation of cookies and the limitations of traditional last-click attribution, which failed to capture the full, nuanced customer journey. As a result, Waldo’s struggled to understand the true value of their TikTok campaigns and how they were contributing to overall business outcomes, leaving them in the dark when planning future budget allocations.

Using a Geolift, a powerful test designed to uncover incrementality in marketing efforts, Entropy was able to pinpoint new sales generated in specific geographical regions of Mexico and attribute those sales to TikTok campaigns. By comparing the performance of exposed areas—where marketing campaigns were actively running—with a control group of unexposed regions, we were able to isolate and measure the true impact of their marketing activities.

By leveraging Entropy´s ability to provide precise, data-backed insights into media incrementality, Entropy was able to find an uplift of 7.1% in Total Revenue by shifting 10% of the total Media Mix into TikTok campaigns – a substantial win with zero incremental investment. Entropy is now using the Geolift results to calibrate MMMs for Waldo’s, to further fine-tune the models and optimize the budget allocations toward true incremental revenue.  TikTok is now part of Waldo´s ongoing Media Mix for performance, driving proven incremental sales.