Your Best Holiday Sales Happen Where Your Pixel Can’t Reach

The 2026 holiday season will reward the brands that can prove what’s working (beyond just clicks). Forrester expects U.S. holiday retail sales to reach $1.1 trillion (up 5.1%), with e-commerce growing 11.6% and driving nearly 60% of incremental holiday sales.¹ The catch: that same forecast puts online at just over a quarter of total holiday sales. The rest happens in stores, at counters, and in apps your pixels never see.

For DTC and eCommerce marketers, that gap matters. Shoppers are also more deliberate this year. eMarketer reports 31.7% are planning purchases earlier, and 29.9% are holding out for major sales events.² Longer, deal-driven journeys are exactly where click-based reporting breaks down.

Pixel-based reporting is still the fastest way to optimize online campaigns, but it only sees part of the holiday purchasing picture. Let’s dive into what pixel reporting misses and why it matters for ROAS.

The Holiday Journey Crosses Every Screen and the Store

Picture a typical holiday purchase. A shopper sees a CTV spot on Sunday night, gets a mobile ad on Tuesday, and buys the gift at your store on Saturday. Your pixel logs two impressions and no sale. The ads did their job, but the report says they didn’t. Expect more of these split journeys this season. Mobile alone is expected to contribute 71.8% of the incremental dollar gains in online sales², so more paths will start on a phone, wherever they end.

Most teams can’t stitch that path together. 59% of marketers cite cross-channel measurement as a top challenge, and only 15% call their measurement very or extremely effective.⁵ Pixels can follow a shopper from an ad to a checkout page, but not from a CTV spot to a store register. When reporting only sees the online half, budgets drift toward whatever is easiest to track, not what’s actually driving sales.

Missing Sales Make Good Campaigns Look Weak

Pixel-based ROAS only counts the checkouts it can see. For DTC brands with retail doors, pop-ups, wholesale partners, or app orders, that undercounts sales and pushes budget toward bottom-funnel tactics that harvest demand instead of creating it.

The pressure to get this right is rising. eMarketer finds 42.7% of consumers are more price sensitive than a year ago,⁴ which means every holiday dollar will be scrutinized. Your finance team wants a sales number, not a click count. Pixel reporting gives you part of that number. Card purchase data shows the in-store sales the pixel misses.

How Pixel Reporting and Merchant Intelligence Work Together

Your online measurement is already strong. Digital Remedy’s pixel reporting in Echo shows which channels, publishers, and creative drive site conversions, how shoppers move across channels before they convert, and, with our Universal Pixel, details like order value and product category. It’s built for optimizing while campaigns are live. What it can’t see is the register.

That’s where Merchant Intelligence comes in. Built with Affinity Solutions, it’s a separate report in Echo that connects ad exposure to real card transactions. You can see whether households that saw your ads shopped with your brand, in-store or online, and how much they spent compared with households that didn’t. Affinity Solutions’ data covers more than 290 million cards, 195 million U.S. consumers, and 5,300+ tracked brands.

With Merchant Intelligence, you can:

• See whether your ads drove spend. Did more exposed households shop with your brand, and did they spend more?
• See what led to that spend. Which campaigns, creative, and devices those shoppers saw, and how long it took them to buy after their last ad.
• Get ROAS based on real spend. Return on ad spend from card transactions, in-store and online, not just the checkouts a pixel can track.

Make This the Holiday You Can Prove

Q4 is too expensive to optimize on clicks alone. With Merchant Intelligence measurement, powered by Affinity Solutions, you can see what exposed shoppers bought, where and when, and move budget while the season is still live.

Ready to strengthen your measurement plan? Schedule a strategy call with Digital Remedy to check your brand’s coverage and see how Merchant Intelligence fits alongside current reporting.

Sources

1. Forrester: U.S. Holiday Retail Forecast, 2026 (Oct 2026)
2. Talk Business & Politics: Early holiday predictions call for a 4.1% rise in retail sales (Sept 2026, citing eMarketer)
3. eMarketer: FAQ on retail media networks (2026)
4. Alliance for Audited Media: New Retail Media Measurement Report (Sept 2026, citing the ANA)
5. Skai: The 2026 State of Retail Media Measurement and Incrementality (Feb 2026)