How Grubhub Drives Enterprise Budget Decisions With Haus

The challenge: two stories, no clear answer

Emma Glicklich leads performance marketing at Grubhub. Her team owns paid media strategy alongside Grubhub's Creative and Brand teams, then designs, measures, and decides next steps for every paid media campaign.

Before Haus, the team ran in-platform incrementality tests on their main paid social platforms. But those results often clashed with in-platform, pixel-based measurement.

"The story that we would see from in-platform pixel-based measurement contradicted the story we would see from in-platform incrementality testing," says Glicklich.

With two conflicting stories, the team was hesitant to make large changes to budget allocation. They couldn't fully trust results and make their next best decisions without seeing the data at a more granular level.

Why Haus: Geo testing built around Grubhub's market nuances

Grubhub focuses their marketing on key cities – that leaves a smaller pool of markets to hold out in a geo experiment, and Glicklich wasn't sure the approach could work.

"I was concerned that we'd be able to get a reliable read on performance using geo holdouts," she says.

As Grubhub talked with incrementality vendors, Haus stood out. The Haus team understood the nuances of Grubhub's geotargeting and worked with them to design tests that balanced business goals with robust, conclusive results.

The move to testing was fast, too. Glicklich says the jump from signed contract to live incrementality tests "exceeded my expectations" — and the team was acting on results within months.

The approach: Consistent methodology across every channel

Grubhub started by running baseline incrementality tests across every channel and initiative.

"Because the tests are using a standardized methodology, which my team is able to understand and dig into with the Haus team, we really trust the data," says Glicklich.

Grubhub also onboarded onto Haus' Causal MMM. Pairing it with incrementality testing gave the team a cross-channel view that individual tests can't provide on their own.

"Being able to use that in combination with our incrementality testing has given us a much better idea of our overall marketing effectiveness," Glicklich says.

A partner, not just a platform

Grubhub works closely with Haus Enterprise Measurement Strategist Jeff Parker, who helps the team read results from different cuts and turn them into decisions.

"Our whole team loves Jeff. He's kind of a legend at Grubhub," says Glicklich. Beyond Grubhub's own results, she says working with Parker has grown her knowledge of analytics, data science, and incrementality concepts more broadly.

The results: Budget moves backed by causal proof

Moving spend out of a low-incrementality channel

Haus testing showed Grubhub was over-investing in a channel with low incrementality. The team reallocated that media spend to more effective channels.

"We're able to make budget allocations that have had a real impact on our business metrics and have really improved our overall program incrementality," says Glicklich.

Settling the paid social debate

To resolve the conflicting paid social signals, Haus ran a multi-cell geo test that held out separate markets for each of Grubhub's main paid social platforms. With one unified methodology, the team could compare both platforms side by side.

The result: One platform significantly outperformed the other on incremental lift across Grubhub's KPIs, even though it looked worse in pixel-based measurement. Grubhub flipped their paid social budget split in its favor.

"It really justified a decision that we'd been thinking about... and we were able to actually feel confident making that change," says Glicklich.

Acting on results, fast

Results only matter if a team acts on them. Glicklich credits buy-in from Grubhub leadership and hands-on support from Haus for that speed.

"Having a lot of support from the Haus team to explain how the results worked has helped to instill a sense of confidence that when there is a result, we should take action on it," she says.

Building an enterprise testing culture

The biggest shift at Grubhub isn't a single budget move – it's how the team thinks about every campaign.

Working with Haus, Grubhub mapped out a longer-term testing roadmap of what they wanted to learn. That mindset now reaches beyond incrementality into audience and creative testing. Every campaign starts with the same questions: What will we learn, and what decision will we make?

"Having this mindset where everything really is grounded in incrementality has helped us to put more of a critical lens on the types of campaigns we want to invest in, and what doesn't make sense to put money behind," says Glicklich.

Making incrementality make sense to everyone

In a conversation with Emily Schwartz, Head of Comms and Brand at Haus, Glicklich shared how she brings the rest of the business along.

• Start with plain English. Her team explains why some marketing metrics don't line up with business impact, and how incrementality closes that gap.
• Reframe the risk for leadership. "At the end of the day, the scariest thing is not knowing what's working," she says.
• Redefine a successful test. At Grubhub, a successful test is one that produces a learning. "You learn as much from a test that doesn't work as a test that does work."
• Don't give up on a channel too soon. A weak result often means there's an opportunity to approach the channel differently.

"Haus really has transformed Grubhub's business and bottom line," says Glicklich.