In 2025, leaders are facing two major challenges. The first is convincing budget-stretched consumers to spend their hard-earned cash as inflation and tariffs cause the cost of goods to surge.
The second is trying to generate mass sales growth while the cost of generating demand through online advertising continues to increase at a rapid rate.
That cost is financial and operational – uncertainty over the future of TikTok due to regulatory changes and shifts in Meta’s platform policies has partly sparked a redistribution of advertising spending across digital channels.
In January, data from MikMak, a global ecommerce enablement and analytics company, revealed that paid traffic from Facebook and Instagram was down by 11%. In contrast, YouTube and Google saw a 99% increase in YouTube traffic and a 33% increase in search – Pinterest traffic also surged by 93%.
“During times of uncertainty, money moves,” says Rachel Tipograph, founder and CEO of MikMak.
“When you look at the increase in spend on YouTube, Google and Pinterest, what this is really about is brand advertisers looking for platforms that drive reach, but also brand safety.”
“Many of these big tech platforms have become political and really large brands get a little scared to be associated with that,” she says.
Leaders must make intelligent decisions on where and how to spend their advertising budgets.
But many multi-channel brands lack visibility into the performance of their campaigns - particularly those that sell through retailers.
Data and insights from paid media to retailers are scattered across various platforms, making it harder for leaders to track their individual effectiveness.
This means they have few insights into what actually happens after a customer clicks on a paid ad or engages with shoppable media content.
Retailers and marketplaces hold valuable purchase data, but many don’t share it and comparing data across different retailers is complex.
Meanwhile, major platforms like Facebook, Google and Amazon limit access to their user data. This makes it hard to get a complete picture of how customers behave across several sites.
Without seeing the full picture of where and how sales happen, business leaders must make decisions with partial or outdated information, causing them to waste resources and miss potential sales.
Brands are effectively flying blind when they lack cross-channel visibility. “They won’t know which campaigns are driving sales, which channels are underperforming, or how different audiences are behaving,” says Tipograph.
“This leads to wasted marketing budgets, poor inventory planning and lost revenue. If brands can’t prove ROI, their teams could face budget cuts or struggle to justify ad spend. Long-term, this lack of insight weakens competitive positioning and slows growth, making it harder to scale online sales.”
The solution is a unified ecommerce marketing strategy – a plan that ensures that a brand’s digital marketing, ecommerce, and retail channels work together seamlessly rather than in isolation.
By using this integrated approach, companies can establish a single source of truth for consumer engagement, sales data, and campaign performance, whether a shopper buys from a direct-to-consumer site, an online marketplace, or a brick-and-mortar store.
An effective strategy connects the dots between awareness, consideration, and conversion.
For example, if a customer sees a brand’s ad on Instagram, clicks through, and ultimately purchases at a major retailer, the brand should be able to track that journey and optimise accordingly.
The benefits for leaders are numerous: reduced budget wastage, improved efficiency and a focus on brand profitability through marketing efforts that are actually driving business growth - but many are still relying on traditional solutions which don’t move at pace with a shifting market.
Algorithms can be tweaked overnight by social media platforms and derail campaign performance, meaning leaders need access to sophisticated tools which can react and move quickly.
More than 8,000 retailers and brands in over 100 countries are tapping into the power of MikMak’s ecommerce enablement and analytics platform, which gives them the power to track multi-channel campaign performance in real time and make more data-driven decisions.
If a campaign drives significant sales at one retailer but not another, leaders can amend budgets accordingly, or if a product is out of stock at a key retail partner, marketing departments can pause ads promoting it to avoid wasted spend.
This agility helps brands maximise ROI by ensuring that every marketing pound is working as efficiently as possible. It also allows brands to capitalise on trends as they emerge, rather than reacting too late.
“Media is real time,” explains Tipograph. “It moves at the speed of light. You need real time data not just to optimise your data for campaigns, but for strategic planning. The world is changing fast.”
“Organisations can no longer plan to invest in advertising spend on TikTok or Meta 12 months in advance. Things are changing daily. I encourage leaders to think: how can you make your organisation operate in real time? That’s the world that we’re living in,” she says.
If leaders merge a unified ecommerce strategy with the right platform, they could succeed in future-proofing their retail operations.
“You need a platform that unifies data across all retail and digital touchpoints,” says Tipograph.
“Real-time analytics and actionable insights, strong attribution capabilities to connect marketing spend to sales are also critical. You also need a platform that integrates with existing tech stacks, from ad platforms to CRM systems, and can adapt to industry-specific privacy regulations and consumer behaviour.”
The message is clear: leaders who invest in a unified approach today will be the ones thriving tomorrow.
For more information about unified ecommerce and enablement analytics, visit: mikmak.com
