Our newsletterVendor reportCassandra, 2025
YouTube ads returned a 2.70x median incremental ROI, measured with marketing mix models
Performance measurement
2.70x
median incremental return on ad spend for Google Video and YouTube campaigns, from 14 marketing mix models covering $3.6M 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 YouTube figure comes from only 14 advertisers and $3.6M in spend, while most other campaign types in the dataset had $27M–$95M. The report itself says to take the result “with a grain of salt”. Results varied widely: the bottom 10% of advertisers got 0.50x or less, and the top quarter got 4.50x or more. The report calls YouTube underpriced, but that is the author’s view, not something the data proves.
- 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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