Quarterly Commerce Marketing Benchmarks for Health and Wellness Brands
Overview and KPIs
Health and Wellness brands operate in a highly consideration-driven category, where shoppers balance routine purchases like vitamins and supplements with wellness exploration, product research, and seasonal trends. Understanding how, when, and where shoppers express purchase intent across digital touchpoints is critical to driving conversion and optimizing media performance.
MikMak’s quarterly Health and Wellness commerce marketing benchmarks provide a data-backed view of brand media trends, retailers displayed, and shopper intent across key global markets, helping brands contextualize performance and refine commerce-enabled activations across owned and paid channels.
This Q4 benchmark analysis is based on MikMak Shopping Index* data from October 1 to December 31, 2025.
The following proprietary MikMak Commerce KPIs were used:
- Purchase Intent Clicks
Measures high-intent shopper traffic by counting the number of times a shopper clicks through to at least one retailer during a single session within MikMak Commerce-enabled brand content. - Purchase Intent Rate
Measures the percentage of shoppers who click through to at least one retailer within MikMak Commerce-enabled brand content, signaling a strong conversion likelihood.
Q4 Health and Wellness Commerce Marketing Highlights
- Shopper intent remains strong in Q4, with elevated US activity and consistent late-year peaks in Canada.
- Brand websites lead conversion likelihood; media fuels discovery.
- Retailer mix reflects mass and pharmacy leadership.
- Shoppable media presents clear growth opportunities.
United States
US Health and Wellness shopper intent built steadily throughout the year, with activity peaking in June and remaining elevated through Q4 as brands maintained strong media and owned channel investment.
Media drives shopper traffic, brand websites lead conversion likelihood
Purchase Intent Rates averaged 43.3% on brand websites versus 5.4% across media, highlighting the dominant role of commerce-enabled owned channels in driving conversion.
Media continues to generate new shopper traffic and reach, offering potential for more direct commerce paths.
Paid social drives shopper traffic
Paid social accounted for 51.8% of media-driven Purchase Intent Clicks, followed by organic search (22.5%) and paid search (19.5%). This shows that US Health and Wellness brands are leveraging social platforms to reach new audiences and drive engagement, with Meta leading social engagement and TikTok/YouTube providing incremental discovery.
Retailer mix reflects mass market leadership
Walmart captured the largest share of Purchase Intent Clicks, followed by Amazon and Target. Pharmacy and convenience retailers, including CVS and Walgreens, were also promoted by brands and among shoppers’ top choices.
Canada
Media drives shopper traffic, brand websites lead conversion likelihood
Purchase Intent Rates averaged 25.5% on brand websites versus 6.5% across media.
While conversion is naturally higher on websites, many shoppers bypass brand sites and go directly to retailers. Making media shoppable not only drives discovery and new audience reach but also unlocks significant growth opportunities.
Brands rely on search to drive shopper traffic
Search overwhelmingly drove media-based Purchase Intent Clicks in Canada, with Google capturing the majority of activity. Emerging AI-driven discovery tools, such as ChatGPT, are beginning to influence purchase intent, signaling new opportunities for Health and Wellness brands.
Social platforms played a limited role, likely reflecting brands' limited shoppable social media campaigns during the period. Expanding commerce-enabled paths across media could unlock significant incremental growth.
Retailer mix reflects mass and pharmacy leadership
Walmart gained the most Health and Wellness shopper traffic from brands' commerce-enabled campaigns in Canada, followed by pharmacy chains like Shoppers Drug Mart and London Drugs. Amazon also holds a key role for online shoppers, while Instacart highlights brands' promotion and growing shopper demand for convenience-driven fulfillment options.
Key Takeaways
- Enable commerce across owned and paid channels: High conversion likelihood on brand websites combined with strong media reach underscores the need for omnichannel commerce activation.
- Prepare for emerging discovery channels: AI search tools and evolving social platforms represent new high-intent touchpoints for Health and Wellness brands.
- Optimize retail coverage: Balance mass retailers with pharmacy and convenience partners to meet varied shopper needs.
- Invest in shoppable media: Direct media-to-checkout paths offer a scalable opportunity to drive incremental conversion and build first-party audiences.
Curious to see how MikMak helps brands connect marketing with commerce and unlock first-party shopper data? Schedule a demo today.
*The MikMak Shopping Index was developed to provide a standardized set of metrics, methodology, and benchmarks to help drive brands’ business results and strategy. It is a collection of key eCommerce KPIs from hundreds of brands, over 250 channels, and more than 8,000 retailer integrations worldwide, to understand consumer online shopping behavior.
