Retail Media has entered a new phase, beyond scale alone. As brands and retailers look past surface-level performance indicators and toward deeper measures of impact, the question is no longer if we measure, but how.
To explore what this meaningfully looks like today, we asked members of our Retail & Media Committee to share their perspectives. From ROAS and incrementality to lifetime value and full-funnel outcomes, they unpack the metrics that matter and how the industry can better align on what success truly means.
A big thank you to the following contributors for sharing their thoughts:
Nicolas Trannoy, Directeur Strategy & Marketing, Lucky Cart, representing Alliance Digitale
Maximilian Knorr, Retail Media Lead @Spark, Publicis Media
Ben Turner, Director, Media, Flywheel
Tim Abraham, Leading EMEA Retail Data Partnerships, The Trade Desk
Max - " Retail Media has matured from a focus on sponsored products to a comprehensive full-funnel channel, capable of engaging shoppers across diverse stages and mindsets. The increase in targeting capabilities and format diversity means that retail media can be used for driving growth across a variety of objectives, beyond simply short term sales."
Tim - "ROAS as a measure of success has its roots in on-site sponsored-search, where the majority of attributed sales come from users clicking and adding to the basket in a single session. However, as Retail Media has expanded to off-site and in-store tracking, success has evolved. In addition to ROAS, marketers are now thinking more broadly. We frequently hear from clients that leveraging off-site retail media is the most significant growth area (this is also reflected in IAB Europe’s research). For off-site, the ability to measure the impact of retail media using “all of market” retail sales is critical. Campaign success should be based on the impact across as many shop-fronts as possible; without that, the impact of retail media can be understated."
Nicolas - "Retail Media is now recognised as being more than a conversion tool, it does have an impact on awareness, consideration and overall on brand equity. You can also see the evolution based on who is responsible for Retail Media. It is moving from e-commerce to more traditional marketing functions. It starts to be integrated in the broader brand strategy and business plans, rather than a tactical tool."
Ben - "Success will always involve spend and sales - ROAS isn't going anywhere. It's where CFOs and CMOs meet in the middle.
But as Retail Media matures, ROAS alone can't answer the bigger question: what are we building? Most brands care about three things: revenue, category share, and profit. When we balance those, we can set a ROAS floor and ceiling - guardrails that protect performance while creating space for deeper metrics like consumer lifetime value.
This is where Return on Consumer is helpful, measuring a projected 12-month value of shoppers already in your funnel. ROAS tells you if campaigns work today. ROC tells you if you're building a sustainable consumer base for tomorrow."
Max - "Before diving into its limitations, it’s worth acknowledging ROAS for what it is: a highly practical metric. It’s simple to measure, easy to replicate, widely understood, and empowers marketers to make quick, tactical decisions in real time. However, ROAS is not the complete picture. It overlooks critical factors such as profit margins, incrementality, customer lifetime value, and the long-term impact on brand equity. Sales attribution can also be challenging as some retailers may choose to attribute conversions post-view, post-click or post-delivery across varying halo effects and time windows. We’ve developed our own ROAS normalisation framework to address this, and we encourage our retailers to return control of attribution methodology to advertisers as well as adopt IAB Europe’s measurement standards by default."
Tim - "ROAS is an invaluable metric for marketers as it provides an in-flight signal that allows for real-time optimisation. This provides huge value as it allows campaigns to be upweighted based on sales performance. This is particularly true when the marketers are using a media platform that allows them to set their own attribution rules and where multivariate AI is available. The chief challenge with ROAS, however, is that it doesn’t track incrementality, i.e. ROAS doesn’t account for sales that would likely have happened even if a user hadn’t been exposed to paid media. As a further consideration, because ROAS is based on identity match rates, it is challenging to compare ROAS between off-site platforms and channels - for example, the ability to match a user purchase to an ad impression in DooH differs from matching an ad impression on CTV."
Nicolas - "While effective and widely used, ROAS can lead to over-simplifying the impact of a campaign. The main limitation is the sale attribution. These sets of rules to attribute sales are relevant comparing solutions, or metrics evolution. Having said that, it is not linked to actual business performance, hence the need to move to incremental measurement. Additionally, the metrics used for a campaign should match the business objective aligned prior to the campaign. Whether a brand is launching a new product, trying to counter a declining market share, or maintaining top of mind awareness makes a significant difference in terms of what to measure."
Ben - "I can totally understand why ROAS became so important to the industry. However, there are some limitations to this view.
(1) Balancing all of our success on the media's role in a conversion based on last-touch and within 14 days of Click/Impression bears no view on the retail state of a product. Reviews, ratings, price and availability all become powerful incentives to buy or not to buy.
(2) ROAS also can’t tell you the value of that customer to the brand. New and existing loyal customers represent very different commercial value to the business in both consumable or durable products.
(3) Ignoring everything up until that point is also quite unhelpful. Based on our frequency analysis across all Amazon conversions, we typically see an average of 7 ads per user (all ad types) before a user converts. If we placed 100% emphasis on an average of 1/7th (14%) of the journey, then attribution should also follow that logic. This is why benchmarking time between Impressions becomes key to moving a customer along in their journey."
Max - "Incrementality testing helps brands and agencies determine which channels, audiences and keywords are most effective at driving demand. It goes beyond surface-level metrics by proving causality and isolating the effect from advertising from external factors such as seasonality and promotions. This should be of the utmost importance to retailers as brands can leverage these findings to justify and secure additional media investment. Connecting these powerful incrementality insights with the fast-paced, real-time nature of programmatic retail media buying remains an ongoing challenge but also offers immense opportunity for innovation."
Tim - "Incremental sales lift measurement is the counterpoint to in-flight ROAS - ROAS does not measure incrementality, but is available in real-time, for sales lift, the reverse is true. Ultimately, we know that incrementality is the key business outcome for advertisers to track media ROI. Incremental Sales lift is specifically designed to allow advertisers to understand what sales were influenced by paid media that wouldn’t have happened otherwise. This is the primary input used to determine channel investment/media planning use cases, as well as providing signal/validation for MMM treatments."
Nicolas - "Retailers and brands share many common challenges; the main one in this case is the need to close the sale. It’s never been easier for a shopper to switch products, brands or retailers. Being able to measure “true” business impact is a must to build retail media tools which are relevant and convincing for shoppers. From a pragmatic perspective, retail media is still under the microscope in terms of investments, so having incrementality will facilitate brand investment both in terms of frequency and absolute levels."
Ben - "What’s important to consider is that what is incremental today, may not be incremental tomorrow. The dynamic that is most important to consider is the maturity of signals we get from retailers and the individual consumers value from that retailer.
But what does incrementality actually tell us? Or, what do we want to see in an Incrementality test? Testing gives us a healthy perspective on what’s true in the given moment. We look at the following before starting an incrementality test: true uplift in sales (vs baseline), avoidance of attribution bias, current channel and tactic ROAS, the diminishing returns of that ROAS and halo conversions."
Max - "Brands should focus on metrics that capture both impact and efficiency. It starts with ensuring investment is competitive, which is reflected in share of voice, and confirming ads are actually seen through viewable impressions. From there, engagement indicators such as click-through rate and page views reveal whether the creative is compelling, while conversion rate validates that the right audience is being reached with the right product. Finally, profitability must be assessed from multiple angles: short-term return on investment, long-term repeat purchase rate, and incremental uplift to confirm true added impact. No single metric provides the full picture, but together they form the foundation for achieving broader marketing objectives."
Tim - "The emerging best practice we see (and recommend) is to track a variety of business outcome KPIs across the funnel - that’s to say, KPIs that track real-world impact, as well as media metrics. For example, mid and upper funnel campaigns could be benchmarked to Brand Lift (e.g. what is the incremental impact on brand preference for exposed users vs unexposed), and lower funnel activity might be benchmarked to incremental sales lift. This also applies to measuring across digital channels - TTD research shows the importance of reaching users across channels like CTV, DooH, and Audio. The ability to run consolidated campaigns across channels for optimisation, frequency capping and measurement is as crucial as full-funnel measurement."
Nicolas - "As stated before, the starting point to define the relevant metrics is to be clear on business objectives. Depending on the brand situation at said retailer, there will be some specific needs. The traditional engagement and conversion metrics usually give a good picture of the situation. Considering a launch, focusing on Share of Voice metrics and visibility is a good starting point. With more established brands, taking a step back with Consumer Lifetime Value, or at least taking into account the shopper’s previous purchases and metrics, could give a more actionable insight."
Ben - "Given the inputs required to make MMM’s truly efficient, we tried to reinvent and simplify. De-duplicating users across the funnel was the first step – for example, a user could be in the actively shopping for headphones and also having viewed one of our headphone product pages. Retailers may signal this shopper to be two individuals that we target twice with two different tactics. This created a new funnel based on ad exposure:
By giving a “credit score” to the users in the bucket with average time spent per stage, we can then start to isolate our gaps in the funnel that advertising can fill."
Max - "Brands and retailers must start by agreeing on shared business objectives and ensuring media KPIs align with those goals. Adoption of measurement standardisation and their attribution methodology are equally important to establish transparency and trust. Finally, they must build the right underlying technology that will seamlessly integrate retailer transaction data with brand media performance to create a holistic view that connects exposure to actual sales and incremental impact. One example of such an approach is our Publicis Warehouse technology which was co-developed with Amazon for the purpose of addressing this challenge and making retail insights actionable."
Tim - "There is a clear opportunity for brands to implement a measurement framework that not only shows the impact of full-funnel and omnichannel (as discussed above), but also the impact across RMN components. For example, how do in-store ads impact the subsequent performance of on-site campaigns? How does off-site impact on-site? The particular concern raised by CPGs is that siloed measurement of on-site in isolation can under-value the “funnel driving” impact of other RMN channels. Put simply, CPGs want to understand how all parts of their RMN buys work together across channels and through the whole conversion funnel to drive business outcomes like ROAS, Brand Lift or Sales Lift."
Nicolas - "Based on numerous discussions on the topic, the reality is that, on one hand, retailers and tech solutions have different capabilities and legacy challenges. On the other hand, brands and their agencies have different strategies and needs. This is going to be the situation for the coming years, and we believe that it is ok. It enables differentiation as well as innovation to come up with the most effective solutions.Taking the pragmatic approach is to build common understanding within the ecosystem on how and what to measure while securing transparency with certification. Clarifying the roles and responsibilities has been useful in France, the template used as an example."
Ben - "Two simple north stars that we try and live and breathe:
1. Centralise true measurement. stand up a secure clean room and use a neutral environment (e.g., Amazon Marketing Cloud, Google ADH, Snowflake, LiveRamp) for privacy-safe joins across media exposure, site/app behavior, and retail transactions.
2. Define shared outcomes: Pick 3-5 business KPIs everyone's marketers can shield within their internal dynamics. A good example is setting a ROAS floor and ceiling, which then allows you to look deeper into incremental sales, new-to-brand rate, net PPM, and LTV. Sadly, CTR goes out the window in retail media if we aren’t converting consumer demand."
IAB Europe’s Retail & Commerce Media Committee is at the forefront of the Retail Media industry. Members are driving Retail Media growth and shaping the landscape by:
All of the work of the Committee can be found in our Retail Media Hub here.
Find out more about our work and how you can get involved by contacting Marie-Clare Puffett - puffett [at] iabeurope.eu.
