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This is a guide for making a few high-impact improvements right now that will strengthen your cross-channel measurement and improve how budget decisions are made within Smartly.
1. Strengthen measurement foundations
The reason for making sure your Smartly measurements are standing on a solid base, strengthen the foundations. This way you’ll get a consistent measurement layer across all channels, and get full visibility across the entire customer journey from inspiration to consideration to conversion. With Smartly, you can move away from channel-mandated proxy measurements like CTR or CPA towards the real business outcomes you really care about, like purchases, add-to-basket, stickiness… Any KPI that is truly meaningful for you.
Integrate your measurement platform
To begin with, fully integrate your measurement platform (GA4 or Adobe) with Smartly. This way all your data will be at your fingertips when making decisions.
Align KPIs with measurement data
Smartly can report and optimize on any data it has access to. Make things simple by aligning key performance indicators with data from the channel (impressions, clicks, conversions):
Product views or searches
Add-to-basket
Ancillary purchases (upgrades, add-ons)
Repeated purchases
This makes Smartly into your single source of truth for performance across channels and allows you to measure performance cross-channel with business KPIs instead of channel-specific metrics. Your conversion and revenue reporting will be more accurate going forward.
2. Introduce MMM-informed multipliers into PBA
When Predictive Budget Allocation (PBA), Smartly’s budget redistribution engine, can take into account your MMM outputs, it connects the long-term brand impact (like YouTube, CTV, upper funnel activity) with to day-to-day optimization. You’ll no longer be overly reliant on short-term conversion signals, and the balance between demand creation and demand capture is improved.
Map MMM-informed multipliers into PBA (channel contribution, diminishing returns curves, incrementality).
Apply these as multipliers in PBA.
Update the inputs in line with MMM refresh cycles.
As a result, your measurement extends beyond platform-level performance to include incrementality and true channel contribution. You’ll have a more accurate view of which channels are driving growth vs capturing demand, and improved confidence in cross-channel budget allocation decisions.
MMM signals are directional and updated periodically. While this improves budget decisioning, it is still dependent on the frequency of MMM updates — which is where real-time signals (step 3) become critical.
3. Take full advantage of server-to-server (S2S) integrations
If you use your existing data in Smartly, it improves signal-quality compared to pixel-based tracking, particularly in privacy-first environments. You’ll be able to optimize for truly high-value actions, not just purchase volume. You’ll have richer, more granular data available for optimization and reporting.
To begin, connect your backend signals into Smartly with server-to-server (S2S) integrations. This may include things like
Purchase value and margin
Product type
Customer type (new vs repeat, loyalty segments)
Ancillary revenue
Your conversion data will have more depth and accuracy and enable real value-based measurement (e.g., revenue, margin, customer quality). You’ll be able to move from “how many products” to “what quality of customer relationship”.
4. Build a tailored reporting layer with consistent naming conventions
With steps 1–3 implemented, you have a comprehensive and high-quality data setup. This next step ensures this data can be consistently structured and interpreted across markets. It will give you a unified global view of performance across campaigns, creatives and markets and unlock cross-market learnings (such as which conversion or product types drive incremental demand). It will also remove manual steps in building reports and reduce inconsistency.
Make everything consistent
The first step is to establish and enforce global naming conventions across all markets. This will make a huge difference to the way that data is drawn into reports.
Note
Without consistent naming conventions, the value of cross-channel measurement and reporting is significantly reduced — regardless of how strong the underlying data integrations are.
Build the right views
Based on your standardized dimensions, build reporting views in Smartly. Set up your Smartly reporting with care and thought by creating and configuring reports that leverage your standard dimensions.
For some more tips, check out our article on How to get the most out of Reporting.
Your cross-channel and cross-market data will then be comparable and scalable, instead of giving you fragmented market-by-market views. You’ll unlock actionable insights at a global level.
How these steps work together
These steps are not standalone improvements — they build on each other to create a more complete system:
Step 1: establishes a reliable measurement foundation across channels.
Step 2: brings in incrementality and long-term impact signals to guide budget allocation.
Step 3: enhances this with real-time, high-quality conversion and value data.
Step 4: ensures all of this is structured consistently across markets, enabling scalable reporting and decision-making.
Together, this enables more accurate cross-channel measurement and smarter budget allocation across markets and channels. You’ll be able to optimize toward revenue and customer value, not just volume. After step 4, you’ll have a solid, scalable framework that supports your global strategy with local execution.