Holiday 2025 Full Funnel Marketing Strategy: WITHIN x Google Future Forward Recap
This year’s holiday season is shaping up to be more competitive and less predictable than ever. Consumer demand is still strong, but shoppers are becoming more deliberate. They’re researching earlier, comparing more options, and locking in their final purchase decisions well before peak shopping moments. At the Future Forward: Commerce & Retail Forum, co-hosted by WITHIN and Google, retail and marketing leaders unpacked what’s driving these changes and what brands need to do to keep up.
Activate the Full Funnel to Capture Today’s Shopper
Andrea Vannucci, Director of Commerce & Retail at Google, opened the morning with a clear message: the customer journey isn’t linear anymore. Shoppers bounce between search, video, social, and e-commerce in minutes. The traditional funnel that so much of marketing relies on no longer reflects how people make decisions.
Google and Ipsos data show just how non-traditional this behavior has become:
- Two in three shoppers discover a brand or product on Google or YouTube
- Shoppers using these platforms make twice as many purchases
- 71% of holiday shoppers rank Google or YouTube among their top three platforms
When discovery, research, and purchase are happening across multiple touchpoints, the takeaway is clear: shoppers use multiple channels, so brands need to, too.
Andrea highlighted one approach that consistently meets shoppers where they are: combining YouTube with Search. Brands using both saw a 21% lift in ROAS compared to running either channel on its own.
The lift becomes obvious when you break down the role each channel plays. YouTube builds interest and intent. Demand Gen keeps your brand top-of-mind as shoppers compare options. Search captures high-intent moments whenever they happen. These touchpoints don’t form a straight line, but together they make it more likely that the shopper chooses you whenever they’re ready.
How Brands Can Put This Into Practice
Show up where shoppers are. Use Search, YouTube, and Demand Gen together, and measure impact through incrementality testing to understand how each touchpoint contributes along the journey.
Build a Measurement Framework You Can Trust
Joe Yakuel, CEO of WITHIN, and Alicia Reich, VP of Digital Marketing at Movado Group, highlighted another major challenge brands face today: measurement has become increasingly difficult to trust. Different platforms claim too much credit. Teams use different KPIs. And ongoing signal loss from privacy changes makes it even harder to see what’s actually working. And when measurement breaks, confidence breaks. Teams end up pulling back on experimentation, and default to short-term efficiency over long-term growth.
The answer to this isn’t chasing a “perfect” attribution model. It’s building a measurement system that gives teams directional clarity, even when the data isn’t complete. That means connecting the signals you do have and using them together to understand what’s really moving the business.
Joe and Alicia explained what that looks like:
- Connect performance data from all sales channels, including DTC, Amazon, and wholesale
- Use proxy signals like branded search interest or store sales to fill in gaps
- Look at real-time indicators such as CTR or site visits to guide day-to-day optimization
- Validate long-term impact through media mix modeling and incrementality tests
How Brands Can Put This Into Practice
Don’t base decisions on a single metric. Combine channel data, proxy signals, and real-time behaviors to build a clearer, more reliable picture of performance.
Use Gemini Enterprise to Scale AI Across Your Organization
Most enterprise teams use dozens of AI tools that don’t talk to each other. That leads to duplicated work, missed opportunities, and overall inefficiency. Sholom Brody, AI Go-To-Market Specialist at Google Cloud, and Michael Choi, Head of AI at WITHIN, shared how Gemini Enterprise can help solve that problem. Gemini Enterprise brings intelligence, automation, and data access into one unified platform. It’s built around four pillars:
- The Brains: Google’s most advanced AI models
- The Context: Your internal systems, including Google Workspace and Salesforce
- The Taskforce: AI agents that support analytics, research, and data work
- The Workbench: A no-code space where teams can build and customize their own tools
The goal of Gemini Enterprise isn’t just to speed up tasks. It’s to connect the systems teams use every day so they can work smarter, automate more of their workflows, and uncover insights faster.
How Brands Can Put This Into Practice
Identify siloed tools, repetitive processes, and areas where data isn’t being fully used. Use Gemini Enterprise to connect systems so teams can move faster and make better, more informed decisions.
Win the Season Before It Starts
Thanksgiving lands later in 2025 (November 27), which slightly tightens the window between Cyber Monday and Christmas. But the real shift this year isn’t the calendar, it’s consumer behavior. According to Google’s internal data, shoppers are moving their research and decision-making much earlier in the season, long before peak promotional moments.
- October and early November are expected to drive higher volume
- 61% of shoppers will have already made their brand and product decisions before Black Friday
How Brands Can Put This Into Practice
Shift more of your holiday media and messaging into October and early November. This is when shoppers are forming opinions, comparing brands, and deciding what they’ll buy once promotions hit. Once you’re in the consideration set, your Cyber Week and December dollars work much harder.
A Holistic Approach to Holiday Performance
Across every speaker, one theme stood out: growth this holiday season won’t come from reacting to the moment. It will come from building the systems, strategies, and workflows that let teams stay ahead of how shoppers actually behave.
Your checklist for Q4 2025:
- Use a full-funnel mix: Be present across YouTube, Demand Gen, and Search so shoppers can find you wherever they’re researching and deciding.
- Rely on real signals: Build a connected measurement approach that pulls together the data you do have and shows what’s truly driving revenue.
- Put AI to work: Use Gemini Enterprise to streamline workflows, reduce manual lift, and uncover insights faster.
- Start sooner: Show up in October and early November, when shoppers are shaping their decisions, so your brand is already in consideration by the time holiday arrives.
WITHIN and Google are here to help you implement these strategies: from building a full-funnel plan to strengthening measurement and scaling AI across your organization.
Let’s Chat