You’ve already launched your holiday media – the hard work is done, right? Budgets are loaded, creative is live, dashboards are dashboarding. But as Mindgruve’s Jacqueline Ruma (VP, Media Strategy) and K.B. Reidenbach (SVP, Products) reminded us in their holiday webinar, this is when the most important work begins.
The core message of this session is simple: most marketers are asking the wrong questions. Instead “Did we hit our impression goal?” or “What’s my ROAS by platform?”, the focus should be on what’s actually driving incremental revenue, how channels work together, and where you should shift budget to have the biggest impact. Our webinar gives you a live playbook for doing exactly that, while campaigns are still in market.
From “Is It Running?” to “Is It Working?”
It’s time to reframe performance around three pillars: Optimize, Evolve, and Prove. For search, that means using AI bidding and first-party data to follow real consumer intent across the full Google ecosystem, not just protecting brand terms. For social, it’s about shifting away from overly polished creative and leaning into scaled, personalized content and authentic UGC that looks and feels native to Reels, Shorts, and feeds. And for programmatic, video and CTV are demand creators, not just awareness vehicles, especially when powered by unified IDs and frequent creative refreshes.
If your current optimization loop begins and ends with tweaking bids and pausing “low ROAS” ad sets, the webinar will give you a much more sophisticated lens.
Your Site Is a Media Channel, Too
When paid channels are optimized, it’s time to evolve owned and earned media. Sending more traffic to a leaky web experience is a fast way to burn holiday budget. The absolute must-haves for your DTC site:
- Fast mobile load times
- Frictionless checkout
- Clear, benefit-led copy and hero offers
- Data-driven fixes to the exact moments where users are dropping off
Site performance as a direct revenue lever, not a technical hygiene task. Every second of delay or extra field in checkout is money walking out the door.
On the earned side, you can cut through the seasonal “SALE!!!” noise with story-driven content, creator partnerships, and real-time social listening. Post earlier than you think, lean hard into short-form video and shoppable formats, and use UGC and reviews to build trust instead of just shouting promotions.
Beyond the Dashboard: What Actually Drove Results?
Here’s how integrated journeys really look: a user might see an Instagram ad, search on Google, click a display ad, receive an email, search again, and only then convert. Last-click attribution gives all the credit to search, but that’s not how demand was created.
An incrementality-first approach achieved through Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) and an advanced analytics platform like Mindgruve’s Sightline has shown our clients some very interesting and powerful results:
- A leading tea brand that discovered CTV and online video were major revenue drivers, not just awareness plays—unlocking 21% more incremental revenue from the same spend and identifying another 17% opportunity through smarter allocation.
- An auto aftermarket retailer that lost 75% of its attribution visibility with cookie deprecation, then used MMM to rebuild clarity, lift in-store transactions by 7% with no extra spend, and increase ROAS from 5.3x to 14.8x.
These examples make a compelling case for shifting from “What did the platform report say?” to “What would have happened if we did nothing?” That’s the heart of incrementality.
While Sightline is a key tool for our clients, the takeaway is that your holiday data likely contains 10–20% more revenue opportunity than you’re currently seeing, you just need the right framework to uncover it.
Why You Should Watch the Recording
You’ll get more from the recording than a recap can capture:
- Practical, “do-this-now” checklists for paid media, owned/earned, and analytics that you can apply this week while campaigns are live.
- Real-world examples with numbers attached—helpful when you need to make the case to a CFO or skeptical stakeholder.
- Strategic prompts you can use to pressure-test your current plan, like “Which of our channels are creating demand vs. just capturing it?” and “How much of our holiday sales would’ve happened anyway?”
- A clearer story to tell internally about why attribution is broken, what incrementality really means, and how to use holiday learnings to plan smarter for 2025 and beyond.
If you’re responsible for holiday performance—whether you own media, ecommerce, brand, or analytics—the webinar will help you move from “We spent it all and hit our goals” to “We can prove what truly moved the needle, and we know exactly where to double down next year.”
In other words: there’s still time to optimize your 2025 holiday campaigns. The recording shows you how.
