Retailers love a big win on paper. A campaign that spikes ROAS. A discount that drives a surge of conversions. A new channel that looks like it unlocked fresh demand.
Here’s the problem: Contribution margin erodes in the background. Piling on discounts may secure customers on the hunt for a good deal, but these one-and-done shoppers aren’t adding to your incremental profit. It’s time retailers drop attributed conversions and vanity metrics for the numbers that matter.
Here’s how retail leaders can replace vanity wins with real growth drivers:
- Prove Lift With a Real Baseline – Stop relying on platform-reported ROAS. Use geo-based incrementality tests to prove lift. This gives you the control group you need to see what’s real and what’s noise.
- Unify Measurement Across Channel – Customers don’t shop in a silo, so structuring your business into multiple distinct P&Ls prevents measuring cannibalization and synergy. Track across all sources for the best blended P&L metrics and market share.
- Fund Only What Adds Profit – Once you know which campaigns actually add profit, reallocate. Don’t spread dollars thin across “everything that looks good.” Put weight behind the tactics that survive a P&L and incrementality review.
- Make Contribution Margin the Scoreboard – If it doesn’t show up in contribution margin, it’s drag. Use this as the filter for every budget, discount, and allocation decision.
A fast-growing beverage brand selling through Whole Foods proved the point. On paper, the campaign looked like a win — 700K+ impressions and a 6.57 ROAS. But the real story was only visible once we measured holistically. Amazon’s brick-and-mortar attribution tied those ads to hundreds of in-store purchases and a double-digit online lift. Without that unified view, leadership would have assumed “organic growth” in retail and missed the real impact. Lesson learned: siloed P&Ls bury the truth, and only cross-channel measurement reveals where margin is actually protected.
A leading fashion brand selling on Sephora and Amazon saw the same thing play out. Platform dashboards told one story. Meanwhile, matched market tests told another. Establishing a true baseline exposed just how much ROAS had been overstated. Once spend was restructured around the tactics that actually drove incremental profit, Google incremental ROAS climbed 38%, Meta jumped 118%, and incremental revenue nearly doubled. The lesson: When you measure correctly, you spend smarter.
Build the Loop, Not the Illusion
My favorite definition of “strategy” is by Alex MH Smith: Strategy is the way a company produces differentiated value. What’s your unique edge? What can you do that your competitors can’t?
Retailers relying on vanity metrics rarely have an answer. They don’t know if success was tactical, repeatable, or just luck. Peak season is the stress test. For many retailers, it still represents a heavy concentration of annual revenue. But flooding Q4 with ad dollars is just another erosion of margin through optics.
The retailers who win Q4 are the ones who:
- Identify the highest-value cohorts before the rush.
- Calibrate spend to the channels that drive incremental lift.
- Set up retention plays that turn holiday shoppers into long-term customers.
Build systems in advance to protect contribution margin when pressure hits. Brands that are spending in September and October are the ones that are going to win in November. Understanding how to build latent demand is the game changer.
The Bottom Line
Teams celebrate ROAS, CTR, or campaign-level “wins” that make a slide deck look good but collapse under P&L scrutiny. Vanity wins aren’t harmless. They inflate costs, distort planning, and convince leadership a broken system is working.
Retailers who survive this market aren’t the ones chasing ROAS spikes. They’re the ones who build systems to measure true lift, reallocate to incremental profit, and make contribution margin the scoreboard.
Ask yourself: Are you chasing optics or building a system that keeps you growing, even when the market doesn’t make it easy?
Ben Dutter is Chief Strategy Officer at Power Digital, and Founder of fusepoint