At Google Marketing Live 2026, Google introduced two measurement tools with the potential to fundamentally change marketing controlling: Meridian MMM, now natively integrated into Analytics 360, and Qualified Future Conversions, a new predictive metric connecting short-term advertising activity with longer-horizon revenue signals. Both represent genuine advances. And both deserve an honest assessment that goes beyond the press materials.
What Meridian MMM Delivers — and What It Does Not
Marketing Mix Modelling is the gold standard of marketing measurement because it achieves what attribution models fundamentally cannot: it measures incrementality. The question an MMM answers is not "which channel delivered the last click?" — it is "if we remove this channel from the mix, by how much does revenue fall?" That is the commercially relevant question. And Meridian, Google's open-source Bayesian inference implementation, answers it with a rigour that attribution models simply lack.
The limitation is not methodological — it is structural. Meridian runs on Google data, and you are measuring the performance of Google campaigns with a tool developed and maintained by Google. This does not make Meridian unusable. It is open-source, peer-reviewed, and methodologically serious. But an independent measurement framework triangulated from multiple sources will always provide a more defensible foundation for strategic decisions than measurement sourced entirely from the provider of the services being measured.
The Right Measurement Framework for 2026
The brands that will make the most defensible marketing decisions in 2026 and beyond are those that build their measurement on multiple, independent pillars. Platform reporting provides operational signals for tactical decisions. Marketing Mix Modelling — whether Meridian or an independent tool — provides the budget allocation perspective. Incrementality tests and holdout experiments provide causal evidence for the impact of specific channels or campaigns. And business-level KPIs — revenue, contribution margin, customer acquisition cost — serve as the final arbiter of whether marketing activity creates commercial value.
The question a CFO or board asks is never "what does the platform dashboard say?" It is: "what did we actually earn, and what did our marketing contribute?" A measurement framework that answers this question is not an analytical nice-to-have — it is a strategic prerequisite for credible marketing decisions.
What Qualified Future Conversions Means
Qualified Future Conversions addresses one of the most persistent blindspots in performance marketing: the optimisation of immediate conversion signals while ignoring long-term customer value. The metric connects current advertising activity with predicted revenue signals — a perspective of substantial value for businesses with long sales cycles, subscription models, or high customer lifetime value. In practice, the quality of these predictions depends heavily on the quality of the underlying data, both conversion data and the CRM data that serves as the foundation for lifetime value estimation.