Our newsletterVendor reportCassandra, 2025
Demand Gen had the lowest median ROI of seven Google Ads campaign types, at 2.22x
Performance measurement
2.22x
median incremental return on ad spend for Google Demand Gen campaigns, the lowest of seven campaign types, from 15 marketing mix models covering $27M of spend in 2023–2025
- Reader Note:
- ROI here is incremental revenue per $1 of ad spend, estimated by Cassandra’s marketing mix models. Cassandra sells MMM software. The figure is based on 15 advertisers and $27M in spend in 2023–2025. Results varied widely: the bottom 10% got 0.85x or less, and the top quarter got 5.06x or more. Even so, the median was still above break-even. The report itself says Demand Gen results need closer scrutiny.
- Evidence:
- Modelled / projected
- Vendor interest:
- High — This comes from a company with a commercial interest in this market, so it is not a neutral source.
- Sample:
- 253 revenue-outcome marketing mix models from 59 unique advertisers, covering $383M in media spend; data spans 2023-2025. Each record is one channel from one model run.
Reader Note:
Evidence:
Vendor interest:
Sample:Good for
Planning with a rough expectation, and sanity-checking your own assumptions.
Not for
- Reporting as what happened. This is what a model expects, not what anyone counted.
- This comes from a company with a commercial interest in this market, so it is not a neutral source.
- Nobody counted this directly — it's a calculation. The publisher worked it out itself, or took the ad platform's word for what its ads achieved.
- This is an aggregated or average number that covers very different cases. Real results in a particular segment may differ.
- The source says how much it looked at, but not how any of it was chosen.
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