While purchase paths were once linear and marketing-driven, today’s omnichannel experiences have put buyers firmly in control. Having on-demand information at their fingertips lets them research products and services, read peer reviews, compare prices, and bounce around (and in and out of) your “funnel” at will. They can even skip journey stages altogether.
Intel gathered by Capital One Shopping Research shows that as many as 91% of retail consumers are omnichannel shoppers. And given that 41% of B2C buyers use generative AI tools when researching high-stakes purchases, adding AI to touchpoint-heavy journeys injects even more layers of complexity into the customer experience.
You’re already contending with increasingly expensive media competition and global economic uncertainty, so your ability to generate revenue is more important (and challenging) than ever. To be successful, you need to be smart about your omnichannel spend. Here are four ways you can win:
With media costs rising, it’s time to optimize your ad strategies for profit, not revenue. Your omnichannel measurement strategy can help you identify your high-value customers. Then, you can adjust your targeting to reach and engage them, directing them toward the highest-margin products that meet their needs. Consider suppressing low-margin SKUs and one-time discount buyers to ensure your ad spend is driving the most possible profit.
How do you know which ads can make the difference between a sale and just being another touchpoint in a competitor’s purchase path? Go beyond platform-reported conversions. Connecting your on- and offline first-party data (CRM records, website and app activity, campaign analytics, and sales and loyalty data) with your media platform data from Amazon, Google, and more gives you a single, privacy-safe source of truth.
Combine your closed-loop measurement with incrementality testing, and you’ll have the info you need for profit-first media buying and optimizing creative for incremental revenue.
Serving the most impactful ads to the highest value customers is one part of the equation, while understanding which channels drive the most growth is the other. In 2026, prioritizing channels like retail media and connected TV (CTV) is essential for a competitive strategy. But it can be difficult to compare their impact against traditional media and other tactics.
By integrating your closed-loop measurement data into a marketing mix model (MMM), you can analyze it alongside results from other tactics, historical benchmarks, and external market variables. MMM can give you a holistic view of how each channel influences revenue and help you determine the most effective budget allocation across your entire media mix.
More media channels, new AI capabilities, changing buyer behavior, and shrinking product margins have the potential to disrupt your strategies in a heartbeat.
Planning for resilience requires predictive measurement strategies and frequent spend testing across YouTube, Meta, connected TV (CTV), and retail media.
By shifting budgets as costs and demand change, you can maintain the performance levels identified in your MMM and ensure your marketing mix remains aligned with real-time market shifts.
Your ability to successfully implement the four outlined steps is only as strong as your data foundation. When the purchase path was linear, siloed data wasn’t as much of a liability. You could view it through the lens of a single channel or funnel stage. But now, disconnected data can lead to overspending on underperforming tactics.
A unified, privacy-safe data framework designed for omnichannel measurement, attribution, and activation ensures you can bridge the gap between your touchpoints, actual purchase behavior, and more ROI.
You can meet your highest-value customers exactly where they are, with the right message at the right time, no matter how many channels they visit or how many traditional purchase stages they skip. And you’ll be able to tie every interaction directly to revenue. Your organization will see your team’s impact, and your competitors will feel it.
Ready to drive more value from your omnichannel investment in 2026? Reach out and let’s talk about your goals.