  We investigate effective holographic models for QCD arising from five
dimensional Dilaton-Gravity. The models are characterized by a dilaton with a
mass term in the UV, dual to a CFT deformation by a relevant operator, and
quadratic in the IR. The UV constraint leads to the explicit breaking of
conformal symmetry whereas the IR constraint guarantees linear confinement. We
propose semi-analytic interpolations between the UV and the IR and obtain a
spectrum for scalar and tensor glueballs consistent with lattice QCD data. We
use the glueball spectrum as a physical constraint to find the evolution of the
model parameters as the mass term goes to zero. Finally, we reproduce the
universal result for the trace anomaly of deformed CFTs and propose a
dictionary between this result and the QCD trace anomaly. A nontrivial
consequence of this dictionary is the emergence of a $\beta$ function similar
to the two-loop perturbative QCD result.
