Ecommerce Measurement Is Broken and How Winners Fix It🧩

Welcome to MarketMaze. E-commerce has become a street fight. Measurement is the weapon, and most brands are bringing a butter knife. This week, we dig into the data behind who’s winning, who’s losing, and what the smart money is doing next.

Main Story
🧩 E-commerce Measurement Is Broken And Here’s How Winners Fix It
💎 Marketplaces Leave DTC in the Dust

Insights🧠
🌍 Temu, Shein, and AliExpress now outrank Amazon in web traffic.
🛒 Winning brands dominate digital shelf keywords.
📊 Top marketers blend MMM, MTA, and incrementality.

LET’S ENTER THE MAZE!
- Artur Stańczuk, MarketMaze Founder

eCommerce has exploded across marketplaces, webshops, and social platforms. But most brands are still flying blind, measuring success with outdated or siloed tools. Fospha’s Peak Playbook 2025 and Halo Report analyze over 83,000 real campaigns and $2.7B in spend. No surveys, just raw data to show how brands can finally connect ads to true sales impact.

Buyers don’t take straight lines. They see ads on TikTok, Meta, YouTube, or Google Demand Gen then check out on Amazon, a brand’s website, or TikTok Shop. That means brands can’t just track their own website anymore. Even if you advertise on YouTube, the sale might happen on Amazon. As social commerce and marketplaces take a bigger slice, the old model (measure clicks, call it a day) misses most of what really drives growth.

Traditional tools like “last click” only credit the final ad before a purchase, ignoring the full customer journey. Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA) tries to split credit but can’t track “walled gardens” like Amazon or TikTok. MMM (Marketing Mix Modeling) uses big-picture data to estimate what drives sales but is slow and high-level, not for daily decisions. Even incrementality testing and ad platform reports fall short. They’re channel-specific and blind to how channels work together. If you only trust what one tool says, you’ll overinvest in the wrong place and undervalue top-of-funnel ads.

In 2024, Meta and TikTok captured a 13% and 14% year-over-year jump in share of Foshpa clients wallet, as brands chased upper- and mid-funnel growth. Paid Shopping soared 20%, while traditional Google Search dropped -24%. Brands also shifted more dollars into YouTube (+11%) and Snapchat (+5%). Affiliates and narrow performance channels lost out. The data proves brands now prioritize high-engagement, flexible platforms (=full-funnel marketing) and the classic “search-first” budget split is officially outdated.

Most brands start in the “fragmented” stage: different teams, siloed KPIs, and duplicated budget. Some progress to “correlated,” sharing data and using blended metrics but still lacking full visibility. The leaders? They unify planning, align KPIs, and model performance across web, Amazon, and social commerce every day. Their advantage: fewer wasted bets, faster pivots, and the confidence to back what truly works. The path to better growth isn’t just more data…. it’s breaking silos and seeing the whole picture, from first ad to final sale.

Sources: 🔒 Available for MarketMaze+ subscribers

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Levanta is partnering with these publishers to connect them with a select group of 7–9 figure brands ready to scale.

Check if your brand qualifies

Today’s eCommerce playbook is all about going where your customers already are. Fospha’s Peak Playbook 2025, based on 83,000 campaigns and $2.7B in ad spend, shows that top brands succeed by looking beyond their own website, spreading their budget up the funnel, and measuring the true impact of every marketing dollar.

Fospha Brands that spend at least 5% of their digital budget on “awareness and consideration” (ads that get people interested before they’re ready to buy) see much better results. Small brands (under $600K/month) get a 22% boost in ROAS (return on ad spend), while big brands (over $600K/month) see an eye-popping 218% higher returns. The takeaway: build your brand early, and peak sales will follow.

Direct-to-consumer (DTC) web shops and Amazon aren’t the whole game anymore. They make up just 65% of sales for Fospha clients. TikTok Shop now grabs 35%, nearly rivaling the DTC web itself. Brands stuck measuring only their own site or Amazon are missing a massive, fast-growing piece of the pie.

The “funnel” is a simple way to map the shopper journey: awareness (first impression), consideration (thinking it over), and conversion (buying). Top brands allocate 10% of their budget during peak season to awareness and consideration, and 90% to conversion ads. Even though it sounds risky to invest up the funnel, those who did saw their upper funnel spend set up bigger conversion wins down the line. Building demand before peak season starts is what separates winners from the rest.

Among Fospha clients, spending more on awareness during peak periods pays off. Brands increased their awareness budgets by 192% and enjoyed a 45% rise in ROAS. Consideration campaigns also did well, with a 19% budget jump and a 31% ROAS lift. Conversion-only campaigns didn’t keep up: spend dropped 5% and ROAS actually fell 14%. The lesson? You can’t win the race if you only sprint at the finish.

Measuring only what happens on your website is a rookie mistake. When brands include the “halo effect” (sales that start on one channel but end on Amazon) they see a 37% average uplift in ROAS. Demand Gen campaigns do best (+46%), but YouTube, TikTok, and Snap also drive big gains. Unified measurement gives a true read on what’s working, so you can put your money behind what really moves the needle.

Sources: 🔒 Available for MarketMaze+ subscribers

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Similarweb reports Temu, Shein and AliExpress just overtook Amazon.com in combined web visits — nearly 3B vs Amazon’s 2.5B in August ’25. Low prices, TikTok-style shopping, and supply chain agility are driving a new era in e-commerce. Will these clicks translate to profits, or is Prime still the king? 👉 Juozas Kaziukėnas on LinkedIn

Profitero+ shows why winning at e-commerce now means dominating keywords, not just shelves. Brand A’s wide keyword spread trumps Brand B’s narrow reach. The lesson: keywords are the new shelf space. Broaden, test, adapt. AI prompts are the next big thing — your growth depends on knowing which products are one tweak away from page 1. 👉 Profitero+ Insight

A year ago, marketing measurement was a battleground of rival methods. Now, platforms are blending Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM), Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA), and Incrementality for unified, accurate insights. WorkMagic and peers in the “middle” are leading the charge. Brands adopting all three methods spot hidden opportunities and outsmart the old-schoolers. 👉 Measurement Landscape 2025

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