Attribution · The measurement gap
Platform attribution takes credit for sales that were already happening. Measuring true incrementality shows you what your ad spend actually caused — not what it was standing next to.
3–5×
Retargeting ROAS inflation
$299/mo
vs $1,500+ enterprise MMM
40–60%
iOS tracking signal lost
The problem
Every ad platform is built on the same incentive: take credit for as many conversions as possible. You had one customer and one transaction — and three dashboards all reporting a win.
01 · Double-counting
Every platform claims the same sale.
A customer sees a TikTok ad, clicks a Meta retargeting ad, then searches your brand name on Google to check out. TikTok claims it. Meta claims it. Google claims it. You had one sale. Three platforms say they each drove it.
02 · Retargeting bias
Retargeting ROAS is inflated 3–5x.
Retargeting captures people who are already going to buy. One DTC brand saw 8x reported ROAS on Meta retargeting. True incremental ROAS, once the already-buying segment was removed: 1.9x.
03 · Signal loss
iOS 14.5 broke pixel tracking permanently.
Apple removed 40–60% of cross-app tracking signal in April 2021. Cookie deprecation is next. Platform attribution is built on a foundation that keeps shrinking — and is not getting better.
The alternative
Marketing Mix Modeling reads your spend and your revenue and measures the statistical relationship between them. It does not care about iOS. It does not care about cookies. It reads the ledger.
The term for what your platforms do is attribution overlap, and it inflates reported ROAS by between 2x and 5x on retargeting campaigns specifically, because retargeting reaches people already intending to buy. The fix is not a better pixel.
It is a methodology that never used pixels to begin with: measure the statistical relationship between changes in spend and changes in revenue, over time, at the channel level. That is what Marketing Mix Modeling does. MixLift delivers it in five minutes, for $299/month, through a Claude conversation. Full PyMC-Marketing, 4-chain MCMC, 90% credible intervals on every estimate.
Illustrative · DTC skincare example
Google Search was their best channel at 5.2x ROAS
Google Search was past saturation — actual marginal ROAS 1.4x
TikTok had 3.8x incremental ROAS with significant headroom. The budget optimizer recommended reallocating $1,350 per week from Google Search to TikTok.
Projected impact: +$41,000/month at the same total spend.
Sample analysis on representative DTC data. Results vary by brand.
Start on the free tier — two channels, two analyses per month, the full Bayesian engine. If your platform numbers are wrong, MixLift will show you where, and by how much.