For years, marketing mix modeling (MMM) has been one of those things that lives in the executive suite. A team of data scientists would lock themselves in a room, run complex regressions on months of data, and emerge with a dense report that, frankly, was hard to act on. Google’s own cited research confirms this: nearly 40% of organizations struggle to apply MMM outputs to actual decisions. I’ve seen it happen. You get a chart saying ‘TV spend has a 0.8 correlation with web traffic,’ and you’re left wondering, ‘Okay, so do I spend more on TV? How much more? And what do I cut?’
That gap between insight and action is where millions of dollars in ad spend get wasted. We make our best-educated guesses, but they’re still guesses.
Then, last week, Google dropped Scenario Planner. It was announced back in February but went live on March 19th. It’s a no-code interface for their open-source Meridian MMM platform, and it’s designed to fix this exact problem. It promises to let marketers like us test budget scenarios and get real-time ROI estimates without needing a data scientist on payroll. The question is, does it live up to the hype?
What It Is and Why It Matters
At its core, Scenario Planner is a visual, drag-and-drop tool for answering “what if” questions about your budget. It connects to your historical performance data from major channels—Google, Meta, LinkedIn, and more—and uses AI models (specifically, gradient-boosting regression trees) to predict the business impact of your next move.
Want to know what happens if you pull $50k from your Meta Ads budget and split it between Google Search and LinkedIn? Instead of running a month-long test and hoping for the best, you can model it in the planner. It forecasts the likely impact not just on channel-specific metrics, but on bottom-line results.
This isn’t just about reallocating budgets for the sake of it. It’s about de-risking your strategy. When I’m managing seven-figure annual budgets, being able to show a client a data-backed forecast of why I’m shifting 15% of spend from Q2 to Q3 for a seasonal push is invaluable. It moves the conversation from ‘I think’ to ‘the model predicts.’
Enterprise clients like Shopify and Asos have been using the underlying Meridian platform since it was released in January 2025, but this new interface makes it accessible. It finally puts the power of the model directly into the hands of the people running the campaigns.
Part of a Bigger No-Code Wave
Scenario Planner doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It’s part of a broader shift where no-code and AI tools are collapsing the distance between idea and execution. We’re seeing this everywhere.
A new tool called GMAQ is doing for creative what Scenario Planner is doing for budget modeling. It uses a blend of drag-and-drop editing and AI to let marketing teams create and personalize email campaigns and landing pages at scale, complete with streamlined approval workflows. Instead of briefing a developer to code ten variations of a landing page, the marketing manager can do it themselves.
We’re also seeing this in the automation space. The ecosystem around HubSpot is a perfect example. Tools like Zapier, Databox, and Seventh Sense let you build sophisticated, automated workflows without writing a line of code. I’ve seen clients integrate HubSpot with video tracking tools via a simple Databox dashboard and see 3x higher close rates on leads who watched more than 75% of a demo video. Seventh Sense uses generative AI to optimize HubSpot email send times, boosting open rates just by being smarter about delivery.
These tools all share a common thread: they empower the marketer to act directly on their strategy. Planning your budget distribution shouldn’t be a separate, isolated task from building the funnel itself. This is why a holistic view is so important; you need to stop thinking in channels and start building integrated funnels. Tools like Scenario Planner help you make the high-level resource decisions that fuel those funnels.
The Practical Reality: Who Is This For?
So, should you drop everything and try to implement Scenario Planner tomorrow? Not so fast.
While the tool is “no-code,” the setup isn’t exactly a one-click process. Meridian, the engine it runs on, is an enterprise-grade platform. Getting your data ingested, cleaned, and properly mapped requires expertise. That’s why Google has built out a network of over 20 certified partners, including heavy hitters like Kantar and Adswerve, to handle implementation.
This tells me that, for now, Scenario Planner is aimed at mid-to-large-sized businesses that are already spending across multiple channels and have enough historical data to feed the model. If you’re a startup spending $5,000 a month on Meta ads, this is overkill. Your time is better spent optimizing your campaigns and building out your initial funnel in a tool like GoHighLevel.
But if you’re a marketing director managing a team and a multi-million dollar budget, this is a tool you need to pay attention to. It provides a credible, data-driven way to plan your spend, defend your decisions to finance, and find hidden opportunities for growth that last-click attribution models almost always miss. It’s about graduating from reactive campaign management to proactive, predictive budget strategy.
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