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Executive summary:
This case study explores how Tallink Silja Line achieved a 50% improvement in return on advertising spend by adopting a marketing measurement framework to find the actual impact of their marketing efforts. The results were achieved through a combination of improved marketing measurement, data-driven budget planning, and selected market-level strategic changes. Learn how they moved away from last-click based attribution and aligned the organization around a more accurate methodology for measuring marketing performance and informing long-term strategic planning.
Key results:
- Achieved a 50% improvement in return on ad spend, increasing revenue by 26% while reducing budgets by 16%.
- Transitioned to data-driven decision-making by identifying the causal impact of marketing activities.
- Established cross-functional trust, validating channel performance with transparent, data-backed evidence.
Company profile:
Tallink Silja Line, part of Tallink Group, is the leading European provider of leisure and business travel and sea transportation services in the Baltic Sea region. Transporting 5.5 million passengers annually along 5 different routes the group has an annualized turnover of €765 million.
The challenge: Solving the attribution bias
Here is a universal marketing challenge: where should you place your next dollar to maximize return on investment? For the marketing team at Tallink Silja Line, a leading shipping and freight company in the Northern Baltic Sea region, this question was complex. Operating across three markets with a mix of dozens of online and offline channels, the team struggled with fragmented data. Ad platforms often over-reported their own contribution, which made it difficult to fairly evaluate channel influence or make objective budgeting decisions.
The team initially moved to Google Analytics 4 as their "source of truth." While this helped consolidate data, the reliance on last-click attribution created a new bias: it over-indexed conversion-focused channels at the expense of top-of-funnel activity. Tiina Lips, Digital Analytics Lead at Tallink, explains:
“Google Analytics would heavily credit Paid Search with conversions while suggesting that Meta was not converting at all. We knew intuitively this was not true, but we were stuck with an attribution model that did not reflect the actual customer journey.”
Without a methodology to evaluate the causal influence of different channels, budget allocation often defaulted to historical levels and intuition.
The solution: A sustainable approach to MMM
The next evolution for the team was to investigate the potential of building marketing mix modeling (MMM) models in-house to solve their attribution challenge. The data management team at Tallink, which has deep knowledge in building and maintaining data infrastructure, quickly saw the potential of MMM but also realized the significant level of time and resources it would require to run and maintain.
“After weighing the pros and cons of building an MMM model in-house, we realized it was too time consuming. We have a lot of other data science projects we want to do and can’t spend all our data scientist’s time just on this. It’s not our core business to build MMM functionality”.
The team instead turned their attention to finding an external partner and started a structured selection process. The team knew that a big part of getting the wider marketing team to adopt a new way of measuring marketing impact was to find a tool that was not only robust and trustworthy, but also user-friendly. With the marketing team already using Funnel for its marketing reporting, incorporating Funnel’s marketing measurement solution ticked all the boxes.
The results: Improving return on ad spend by 50%
Once the measurement project with Funnel was implemented, the team at Tallink were quick to dive deep into the numbers and share insights across their marketing organization. Marketing performance and budgets are reviewed weekly and the added measurement insights help provide a more accurate picture of which activities are moving the needle. Within the first six months of having access to the new insights and implementing their new processes, the team managed to achieve a remarkable 50% improvement in their return on ad spend:
"Thanks to this new budgeting process, we managed to increase revenue while decreasing spending. Despite a 16% digital paid media budget reduction toward the end of the year, we grew revenue gained from paid digital media by 26% because we were putting our money in the right places."
The shift has not been limited to short-term optimization and reporting. Otto Kregor Tagapere, Data Scientist at Tallink, explains how Funnel’s impact is increasingly evident in cross-functional planning and long-term decision-making, highlighting the growing trust in data across the organization:
“One telling moment came at the end of last year, when Funnel’s budget and revenue projections were brought into the annual planning discussions alongside our in-house forecasts. It reflects how data has become a trusted input in strategic conversations and a natural part of how we shape our long-term direction.”
Having refined their paid media measurement, the team is now setting its sights on quantifying the impact of non-paid efforts like organic social and direct communication. Their goal is a 360-degree view of the customer journey where every effort is measured by its true contribution to the bottom line.
