Sensor Tower's Full Funnel Digital Intelligence Playbook

The whole is greater than the sum of its parts, is just as true across the digital landscape. Understanding your audience, tracking their engagement across your website and app, and analyzing where they’re seeing your ads are all important metrics on their own. But, together - that’s where the magic happens. We analyzed multiple competitors across three categories using Sensor Tower’s Digital Advertising, Mobile App, Web, and Audience Insights to hitch a ride with your users in Sensor Tower’s Full Funnel Digital Intelligence Playbook. Here’s a preview.

Home and Lifestyle Retailers

From everyday purchases to higher ticket items Home and Lifestyle retailers are using very different digital strategies to reach shoppers across app and web. For a category where much of the shopping journey occurs online, web traffic growth is an important signal of where consumer engagement is building.

Wayfair maintained the largest web footprint in 2025, while Kohls led the category in YoY traffic growth with +16%, followed by Macy’s at +10%, creating increased competition at the top of the category.

But, while premium brands like Macy’s and Kohl’s maintained a strong web presence in 2025, they also built significant app-only users with 42% and 38%, respectively, while more premium brands like Crate and Barrel and Williams-Sonoma rely exclusively, or almost exclusively on web traffic.

We can see this delineation even more across mobile app insights. With Wayfair leading across MAUs and Downloads, Kohl’s and Macy’s were in lockstep across mobile with comparable volumes for each. That app performance is notable with both brands similarly ranked among the leaders in app engagement and web traffic growth.

But this begs the question - are these brands reaching the same types of shoppers? The answer: No. 

Utilizing Audience Insights, we found that, despite nearly identical app audiences, in terms of size, Macy’s and Kohl’s are serving two different types of shoppers on their apps. In 2025, Macy’s app users over-indexed most heavily for the Fashionista and Sneakerhead personas, two style-driven, trend-conscious types of audiences who likely engage with Macy’s as a fashion destination. 

Kohl’s on the other hand catered to the Wholesale Shoppers, Shopaholics, and Home Cook personas, reflecting a more value-based, household-focused customer who shops with practicality in mind. These differences underscore just how fundamentally different their approaches to customer acquisition are.

And the final piece of the puzzle - Digital Advertising. Across the home and lifestyle retailers…wait, we’re giving it all away. There has to be some mystery left in this story. They don’t give away the movie’s ending in the trailer, do they? 

Excited to learn more? You can find out the ending to this story and a breakdown of the Cosmetics and Banking categories by Downloading the Full Report. We promise, it won’t leave you hanging.