Retail marketers often rely on video campaigns to capture holiday shoppers, but traditional measurement methods like last-click attribution fail to capture the full impact of these efforts. A new analysis by Google and TransUnion, covering over $2 billion in Q4 retail ad spend across 25 U.S. brands, reveals that YouTube outperformed TV, other video, and paid social by 13% in return on ad spend (ROAS). Demand Gen campaigns on YouTube also surpassed paid social averages by 11% in online ROAS and 14% in-store.
To maximize holiday video investments, retailers need a robust measurement strategy that combines incrementality experiments, calibrated marketing mix models (MMM), and real-time attribution. Claire Fanning, Managing Director of Data, Measurement & Analytics at Google, emphasizes the importance of unifying first-party data signals to ensure AI-powered campaigns optimize for actual profit rather than estimates. Advertisers using Google tag gateway saw an average 20% uplift in conversions in their Demand Gen video campaigns.
Petco demonstrated the power of this approach by connecting its first-party signals to Demand Gen campaigns, resulting in a 626% increase in omnichannel ROAS and a 71% surge in physical store visits during Cyber Week. Setting incrementality baselines before the holiday rush and steering budgets with real-time signals can help retailers identify which video channels have the most potential for growth.
Fospha’s media mix attribution data shows that advertisers looking beyond last-click metrics can uncover up to 18X more value from their YouTube campaigns. By measuring view-through and engaged-view conversions alongside attributed brand searches, retailers can gain a complete picture of how YouTube drives demand and sales throughout the entire customer journey.