Abstract:The holographic formalism is applied to the calculation of the effective potential for the scalar glueball operator. Three different versions of this operator are defined, and for each we compute the associated effective potential and discuss its properties and scheme ambiguities. For one of them, the trace of the stress tensor, the potential is fixed by scale covariance and the conformal anomaly. Contact is made to earlier attempts to guess this effective potential from the conformal anomaly. We apply our results to the Improved Holographic QCD model calculating the glueball condensate.