The fastest way to lose a budget conversation is to defend it with attribution numbers nobody believes. The essays in this category lay out the measurement architecture that actually holds up under finance scrutiny — Marketing Mix Modeling done with Meridian, GA4 setups that don't lie about their own assumptions, and the incrementality work most teams skip until it's too late.
Operating references: the Meridian MMM Hub — readiness checklist, FAQ, and the proof-layer thesis — and the GA4 Audit Hub — 8-point reality check for analytics leads cleaning up GA4 in 2026.
Google's new metric credits campaigns with conversions that haven't happened yet — future-tense credit, not past-tense estimation — and it's headed for Meridian. How QFC works, and the pre-QFC baseline to freeze first.
Google now predicts your conversions with Gemini and feeds them into the same Meridian MMM meant to verify your spend. When the optimizer and the auditor share one brain, your proof layer becomes a mirror — and independence becomes a setting you have to defend.
Google's open-source Marketing Mix Model isn't just a measurement tool. It's the confidence infrastructure that lets enterprise teams stop defending budgets with broken attribution.
Default attribution, modeled conversions, consent-mode gaps, and the specific places your data is over-crediting some channels and burying others.