From Awareness Budgets to Performance Channels
Display and Meta used to be awareness budgets nobody could defend, now they carry targets like every other channel
Situation
Single-channel dependence. Sunweb runs two seasonal markets: winter sports and summer holidays. Paid search absorbed the majority of the paid budget in both, so growth was capped by the size of one channel.
In both markets, Meta and Display ran on fixed budgets as awareness line items, because GA4 measurement could not connect either channel to conversion. All measurement ran through GA4 last-click.
Complication
Last-click credits the final click before purchase, so GA4 could not prove upper-funnel impact. In travel that matters more than in most categories: covering 80% of customer journeys takes 29 days, which makes upper-funnel contact and view-through conversions genuinely incremental rather than incidental.
The setup was self-reinforcing. In GA4, search was over-credited and everything upstream was starved. Meta and Display looked unprofitable, so both received fixed budgets and no targets. No targets meant no active campaign management, and that meant systematic underinvestment.
Key Question
How can Sunweb measure Meta and Display accurately enough to manage them against real performance targets instead of fixed awareness budgets?
Solution
Kickbite replaced GA4 with full-funnel attribution at channel level, campaign level and down to individual ad creative.
Totals don't change; the backend stays the source of truth. Kickbite matches the backend source of truth 100%, so every stakeholder from C-level to channel specialist trusts the same numbers.
What changes is the distribution of cross-channel credit, and that redistribution is where the impact of the full funnel becomes visible.
Search barely moves: +2% in both markets. It was the only channel Sunweb could manage as performance, because it is the one channel whose measured value does not depend on the model.
Direct loses 31% of its value in Kickbite. Under last-click, Direct is where conversions land when the model cannot explain them. Kickbite reassigns that credit to the channels that earned it.
Display +443% and paid social +110%. Display prospecting went from appearing to return under 3× ROAS to returning 16× ROAS. Same spend, different answer about what caused it.
Results
The Change
Targets replaced fixed budgets. Meta and Display got benchmarks, which made scale and cut decisions possible for the first time.
A 45× efficiency gap sat inside one budget line. Consideration campaigns returned 15.2 ROAS; awareness campaigns returned 0.34. One display campaign alone took 23% of prospecting budget and produced 43% of revenue.
Budget became directional. Spend now moves monthly with performance: scaled into peak booking, cut back as efficiency rose. Between February and July 2026, the share of paid budget going to Meta and Display grew 2.3×.
Creative became a system. Kickbite workshops trained the team to brief from data, and Kickbite measures creative cross-channel rather than in Meta's self-reported view. Win rate became visible and improvable: 9 of the top 40 creatives produced 43% of revenue from 17% of spend, while 7 produced none at all.
Results
Summer holidays carried formal monthly targets across the measured period.
Revenue beat target in five of six months. The ROAS target was beaten in all six, averaging +26.5% and reaching +74% and +48% in the final two months while spending 37–39% under budget.
Absolute efficiency improved on the same trajectory: overall ROAS rose from 29.1 in the first three months to 43.1 in the last three, a +48% improvement.
Meta and Display now carry real targets, budgets move monthly with performance, and the playbook is extending to Sunweb's other brands and categories.
Results
