99% Multi-Channel Retailers Use Connected Data for Omnichannel Advertising, Are You Still Behind?

In 2023, the Netherlands marked a historic retail milestone when the number of online stores surpassed the number of physical high street locations for the first time, and new European Union carbon reporting regulations set to take effect in 2025 have added new complexity and opportunity to retail marketing strategy. As consumers increasingly adopt flexible, channel-agnostic shopping behaviors that blend online research, in-store engagement, and cross-platform interactions, retail brands are rethinking their marketing approaches to align with shifting expectations. Omnichannel advertising, powered by connected customer data and optimized through effective Google ads and strategic search engine marketing, has emerged as the leading framework for driving growth across both online and offline touchpoints while meeting modern consumer demands. This article explores the structure, impact, and emerging evolution of data-driven omnichannel advertising for retail, drawing on recent case studies and industry research to outline actionable strategic insights.

1. Introduction and Industry Background of Omnichannel Advertising for Retail

The retail industry has faced unprecedented pressure over the past several years, especially for traditional high street operators, as consumer behaviors have shifted dramatically. Today’s consumers no longer commit to a single shopping channel; instead, they choose where and how they want to engage and purchase on a case-by-case basis, taking more time to make purchase decisions and considering a wider range of brands than in previous eras. For most multi-channel retail brands, the majority of customer research and planning still happens online, while a large share of final purchases still occur in physical stores, creating a gap between traditional marketing strategy and actual customer journeys. Traditional digital marketing has long focused exclusively on digital-only KPIs, such as growing digital sales or increasing website traffic, which ignores the major opportunity to leverage online marketing strength to boost in-store revenue and improve overall customer experiences. Omnichannel advertising addresses this gap by unifying strategy and measurement across all customer touchpoints, creating a coherent ecosystem that meets customer demand for flexible shopping options. Common omnichannel features, such as buying online and picking up in-store, not only deliver greater convenience for customers but also reduce the number of delivery trucks on the road, supporting environmental goals when most customers live within 30 minutes of a local store. Other features, such as in-app scanning of in-store price cards to access additional product information, keep customers engaged within the brand’s ecosystem while meeting their need for transparent, detailed information during shopping. As competition intensifies and consumer expectations continue to evolve, omnichannel advertising has shifted from a competitive differentiator to a core requirement for retail brands that want to drive sustainable growth and retain customer loyalty.

2. The Core Role of Connected Customer Data in Enabling Seamless Omnichannel Experiences

Connected customer data that unifies information from online and offline touchpoints is the foundational requirement for any successful omnichannel advertising strategy, as it enables brands to deliver consistent, frictionless experiences across every stage of the customer journey while accurately measuring the full impact of marketing spend. Without connected customer data, brands are forced to operate in silos, with digital teams focused on digital-only KPIs and in-store teams focused on offline outcomes, leading to misaligned goals and missed opportunities for incremental growth. Connected data breaks down these silos, enabling core omnichannel features such as unified inventory management that supports flexible fulfillment options like in-store collection, allowing brands to send customers accurate order confirmation within 30 minutes of an online order for in-store pickup. It also enables accurate measurement of how online advertising drives in-store foot traffic and sales, giving brands a complete picture of their marketing return on investment rather than an incomplete view that only accounts for digital conversions. Connected customer data also enables the use of AI-powered bidding and optimization tools that can optimize for cross-channel business goals, rather than just digital conversions, allowing brands to automatically adjust campaign settings to maximize overall business growth regardless of where the final purchase occurs. For brands with large physical retail networks, connected customer data also enables localized campaign optimization that can drive growth down to the macro-local level, aligning marketing messages with customer intent based on their proximity to local stores and their recent cross-channel engagement history. By unifying data across touchpoints, connected customer data also enables the cross-team alignment and mindset shift that is required to implement successful omnichannel strategies, ensuring all teams work toward shared overall business goals rather than siloed channel-specific targets.

3. Case Analysis 1: MediaMarkt’s Omnichannel Advertising Pilot Driven by Connected Data

MediaMarkt is Europe’s largest electronics retailer, with approximately 900 physical stores across 12 European countries, including 72 stores in the Benelux region, and a large, established digital presence alongside its physical footprint. The brand recognized the shift toward channel-agnostic consumer behavior and set out to test how integrating offline goals into Google ads and Google advertising could drive incremental growth, building on its existing work to connect online and offline customer experiences aligned with SEM google best practices. Gabriël Dakdan, who leads the integration of MediaMarkt’s digital and physical commerce channels in the Benelux, noted that the brand’s core goal was to leverage the strength of its online channels to better support in-store sales while improving the overall customer experience, amid a challenging retail environment for physical high street locations. To measure the impact of the new omnichannel strategy accurately, the MediaMarkt team used the causal impact methodology, which compares outcomes between a test group and a demographically and performance-matched control group to predict what sales would have been if no changes were implemented, allowing for an accurate calculation of the incremental impact of the new strategy. The team carefully selected two unrelated product categories with matching pre-existing sales trends to avoid skewing results: headphones as the test group and microwaves as the control group, ensuring that a natural correlation between product categories would not create a false positive result. In May 2023, the team switched the test group to omnibidding, set up through Google ads Smart Bidding, which uses AI to generate accurate predictions of how different bid amounts will impact different business goals, allowing the team to optimize for in-store sales as well as online outcomes. After three months of training the AI model and collecting performance data, the team compared actual results to the predicted baseline. The pilot delivered outstanding results that far exceeded initial expectations: the test category saw a 9% increase in online sales and a 78% increase in offline sales compared to the baseline performance that would have been achieved without the new omnichannel strategy. The pilot confirmed that shifting KPI focus to include offline goals, leveraging connected customer data, and aligning teams around shared cross-channel goals allows retailers to drive significant incremental in-store growth while also growing online sales, delivering a positive impact to the overall business bottom line regardless of where purchases occur. This successful pilot also demonstrates how well-executed SEM, or search engine marketing, can unlock dramatic growth that would otherwise remain out of reach for multi-channel retailers, making SEM search advertising a core investment for retail brands looking to grow both online and offline sales.

4. Case Analysis 2: Pandora’s Omnichannel Holiday Advertising Strategy Leveraging Connected Customer Data

Pandora is the world’s largest jewellery brand, with a core mission to democratise jewellery and make it accessible to all consumers, and the holiday shopping season accounts for a significant share of the brand’s annual revenue. The brand has directly observed that holiday shopper behavior has become increasingly complex and unpredictable, with 75% of holiday shoppers across surveyed markets reporting that they search for deals, discounts, and promotions throughout the entire holiday shopping season, not just during major sale events. This means marketers must be prepared to engage shoppers before, during, and after major events like Ramadan, Singles Day, and Black Friday to capture all available growth. To address this challenge, Pandora developed an always-on omnichannel holiday advertising strategy that leverages connected customer data, Google AI, and holistic measurement solutions to drive sales across both online and in-store channels, building on their years of success with Google advertising and SEM. The brand follows a structured year-round preparation process to ensure it is ready for its key holiday consumption period around Christmas. The team runs innovation tests from January to October to gather actionable learnings that can be applied before the peak season, then freezes testing and shifts focus to retail operations from October through December. The team starts planning Christmas campaign go-to-market execution around May or June, once investment levels are confirmed, campaign details are finalized, and all required toolkits are prepared, and aligns all cross-functional teams by October to execute based on tested, proven learnings. Pandora has fully aligned the entire organization around a holistic measurement strategy that blends online and in-store KPIs, combining store sales measurement with first-party connected sales data to give leadership a full picture of performance across the entire business and identify opportunities for incremental growth. After testing Local Inventory Ads and Performance Max for store goals and confirming incrementality, the brand scaled the initiatives across all global markets, leveraging its global structure to enable close collaboration between central and local teams. In 2023, this approach delivered a 220% year-on-year increase in offline revenue, which contributed to a 77% growth in total Google ads revenue for the brand, proving that Google ads optimized for omnichannel goals outperforms siloed digital-only strategies by a wide margin. Pandora also focuses on covering the entire marketing funnel, building brand affinity and showcasing products through storytelling early in the campaign, then scaling lower-funnel YouTube Video action campaigns closer to key promotional periods to maximize conversions. For later stages of the purchase journey, the brand uses Shopping ads to clearly communicate shipping details, click and collect options, return policies, and uses Local Inventory Ads to help customers check in-store product availability and drive in-store visits once holiday delivery windows close. This tactic is a core component of high-performing SEM google strategies, as it connects local search intent directly to in-store conversions, a key outcome of well-planned search engine marketing. The brand also maintains full budget agility, setting the initial holiday budget in January to enable early testing, then moving to an open budget framework where the team reviews incrementality of both online and in-store sales every two weeks, reallocating additional budget to high-performing areas that exceed the marginal ROAS threshold to adapt to real-time trends and avoid leaving incremental growth on the table. This level of agility is particularly critical for SEM and SEM search advertising, where consumer search intent can shift rapidly during peak holiday shopping periods.

5. Emerging Extension: Integrating Sustainability into Connected Data Strategy for Advertising

As global focus on sustainable development continues to evolve, integrating sustainability into connected customer data strategies for omnichannel advertising has emerged as a key strategic priority for retail brands, driven by both new regulatory requirements and shifting consumer expectations. On the regulatory side, new carbon reporting requirements coming into effect across the European Union demand a more sophisticated, data-driven approach to measuring emissions generated by marketing activities. On the consumer side, 4 out of 10 Europeans report that they occasionally or regularly consider sustainable development and climate change when making purchase decisions, proving that environmental awareness is well established among consumers and creates a tangible opportunity for brands that can credibly integrate sustainability into their marketing strategies. To help advertisers better measure and manage the carbon emissions associated with their advertising activities, Google launched Carbon Footprint for Google ads, a tool that provides first-party connected data to help marketers track the carbon emissions of their Google advertising campaigns across Display & Video 360, Search Ads 360, Campaign Manager 360, and Google ads. This data was developed in alignment with the Greenhouse Gas Protocol and Ad Net Zero’s Global Media Sustainability Framework, and Google as a founding member of Ad Net Zero participated in the working groups that developed this framework to estimate emissions across all delivery channels using established media industry and climate science standards. Carbon Footprint is currently available on demand for advertisers running large-scale campaigns, and will be rolled out more widely to all advertisers in the future. Integrating sustainability data into connected omnichannel data strategies creates tangible business value for brands, as accurate measurement is critical to establishing achievable and effective marketing priorities and net-zero emissions targets. Early pilots of the Carbon Footprint tool found that the traditional spend-based approach to measuring marketing carbon footprint massively overestimated advertising emissions, leading brands to incorrectly view marketing emissions as disproportionately high compared to other core business activities such as business travel or office energy consumption. This is especially relevant for brands running SEM, as many brands incorrectly assumed that SEM search advertising would have a disproportionately high carbon footprint compared to other marketing channels, but accurate connected customer data changes that incorrect assumption. With more accurate first-party connected data, brands can get a clear picture of their actual advertising emissions, and rebalance the priorities of their overall carbon reduction strategy to focus on the areas that will deliver the greatest real environmental impact. Additionally, independent analysis shows that ads that combine environmental responsibility with a clear brand message perform 54% better on average according to Ipsos’ Global Advertising Effectiveness Index, and AI-powered tools like Insights Finder can help brands identify audience segments that are sensitive to eco-conscious consumption behaviors and deliver tailored messages to these groups, allowing brands to reconcile strong Google advertising performance with a greener approach to SEM and search engine marketing planning and execution.

6. Key Takeaways and Strategic Implications for Retail Marketers

The case studies and emerging industry trends outlined make clear that omnichannel advertising driven by connected customer data is one of the most powerful strategies for retail brands to drive sustainable growth in the modern retail landscape, and there are several clear, actionable key takeaways that retail marketing teams can apply to their own strategies. First, shifting from siloed channel-specific KPIs to shared cross-channel goals that include both online and offline outcomes requires a deliberate mindset shift across internal teams, but this shift unlocks significant incremental growth that would be entirely missed with a traditional channel-first approach. The MediaMarkt pilot confirms that even a targeted test of omnichannel bidding optimized for cross-channel goals can deliver dramatic increases in offline sales while also growing online sales, delivering a strong positive impact to the overall business bottom line regardless of where purchases occur. Second, long-term preparation and structured annual testing are core to successful omnichannel peak season strategies, as demonstrated by Pandora’s approach of year-round testing to gather proven learnings before the key holiday consumption period, allowing the brand to scale only what works and deliver significant double-digit growth in total ad revenue. Third, maintaining budget fluidity and agility across channels is critical to capturing all available growth opportunities, as customer behavior during peak periods is often unpredictable, and regular review of incrementality across online and in-store sales allows brands to reallocate budget to high-performing areas and avoid leaving incremental growth on the table. Fourth, integrating sustainability measurement into connected omnichannel data strategies is no longer just a corporate social responsibility initiative, but a strategic requirement that helps brands meet new regulatory obligations, align with shifting consumer expectations, and improve overall advertising performance, while also enabling more accurate prioritization of carbon reduction efforts across the entire business. Finally, connected customer data combined with AI-powered optimization tools enables brands to deliver the seamless, flexible experiences that modern channel-agnostic consumers demand, while also providing more accurate measurement of the full impact of marketing spend, allowing brands to continuously optimize their strategies for better business and sustainability outcomes over time. To effectively implement these omnichannel retail marketing strategies, Topkee provides one-stop Google ads-based online advertising services that fit both small businesses and large companies, specializing in Google advertising and SEM google solutions, aiming to help brands increase potential customers, sales and overall advertising ROI, and also offers an Advertising ROI Calculator for brands to get clear expected return estimates for their SEM search advertising campaigns. Topkee’s full set of professional services covers comprehensive website assessment and analysis that uses the latest scoring tools to identify SEO issues, generate detailed reports, provide targeted solutions, and optimize website content and structure to boost search ranking, business exposure and potential customer conversion rate, a critical foundation for any successful search engine marketing strategy that complements paid SEM efforts, TTO initialization settings that support centralized management of multiple advertising accounts, realize accurate and diverse data tracking, and enable one-click conversion event setting and automatic data synchronization for full process data automation, customizable TM settings that deliver more flexible customer tracking than UTM, allowing brands to generate customized tracking links and monitor advertising effects at any time to make marketing activities more accurate and targeted, professional marketing activity theme proposal development that sorts information from multiple dimensions to generate customized high-quality activity plans and saves internal planning time, in-depth keyword research that analyzes business, products and competitors to sort and expand matching core keywords for SEM google and search engine marketing campaigns, and integrates intelligent strategies to improve ad reach, relevance and effectiveness, AI-powered graphic and text creative production that combines product information and market trends to generate high-quality creative materials and improve marketing promotion efficiency, data-driven attribution remarketing strategies that sort user groups based on behavior and attribution results to deliver personalized remarketing content, and data shows this targeted approach makes users more than 70% more likely to make a purchase compared to users clicking general untargeted ads, as well as periodic advertising report analysis that comprehensively reflects advertising performance from multiple dimensions including budget, conversion and ROI, provides targeted optimization suggestions, and guides continuous adjustment of budget, bidding, keywords and ad content to help brands leverage data to optimize Google advertising campaigns continuously.

Conclusion

Omnichannel advertising driven by connected customer data has redefined how retail brands engage consumers and drive growth in today’s increasingly competitive and complex retail landscape. As demonstrated by leading global brands including MediaMarkt and Pandora, unifying data and goals across online and offline touchpoints enables brands to deliver dramatic incremental growth while meeting the flexible experience expectations of modern consumers. Whether you are just launching your first Google ads campaign or scaling an existing omnichannel Google advertising strategy, these case studies prove that data-driven SEM can unlock transformative growth for multi-channel retail brands. The emerging integration of sustainability into connected data strategies also adds new long-term value, helping brands meet evolving regulatory requirements, align with consumer environmental awareness, improve overall advertising performance while progressing toward global net-zero targets. For retail marketing professionals looking to implement or optimize their own data-driven omnichannel advertising strategies, whether you are building a new SEM search advertising program or refining an established search engine marketing strategy, consulting experienced professional advisors can help tailor approaches to your brand’s unique footprint, customer base, and business goals, ensuring you capture all available growth opportunities while meeting evolving industry and consumer demands.

Appendix

A case study on the MediaMarkt omnichannel pilot program, written by Gabriël Dakdan and Danny Hsiao in November 2023.
Elizabeth Wang's September 2024 analysis report on Pandora's 24/7 omnichannel holiday strategy.
Adam Elman's April 2025 discussion article on integrating sustainability and carbon emission measurement into connected data advertising strategies.