Commerce media: the industry’s biggest questions, answered

Here’s what you need to know, now, to grab its opportunity with both hands and hang on.

1. What’s the best way to start? Which platforms, partners, and placements should we prioritize?

Platform-wise, prioritize where your buyers already are. For most brands, that’s one major retailer network plus one offsite activation partner that can extend those audiences into video, social or display. Depth beats breadth early on.

But move your focus to your purpose – what business need do you have – rather than to the platform. Take a test and learn approach, picking one or two use cases to start – whether that’s driving penetration on a hero SKU, launching a new product, or winning a seasonal moment.

Budget should come from where impact is measurable. For most marketers, that means reallocating a portion of shopper, trade or performance budgets first, then, as confidence grows, layering in brand budgets for upper-funnel activation powered by commerce data. Keep placements simple at the start: sponsored products, sponsored brands and one scalable offsite format like CTV or paid social.

Finally, protect your team from complexity. Centralize ownership, standardize measurement early, and resist bespoke one-offs. Your goal isn’t to do everything – it’s to build a repeatable, scalable growth engine.

2. How do I measure success beyond last-click sales?

Of course, having clawed some budget for commerce media, you want to make sure you’re actually driving a new sale rather than paying to reach a customer who was already at the shelf.

So focus on measuring incrementality, not attribution. Basically, move from ‘who got the click?’ to ‘what actually changed?’

That means using test-and-learn: holdout groups, geo-tests, or retailer-controlled experiments to understand the sales that wouldn’t have happened without media. Pair that with metrics like new-to-brand buyers, penetration growth, basket uplift and repeat rate, not just ROAS.

At the upper funnel, link exposure to downstream behavior: product searches, page views, store visits and consideration, then connect those signals back to sales over time.

3. But how can I understand performance across such a fragmented system?

Five different retailers can have five different metrics and reporting formats. It’s a hassle. The answer is to build a retailer-agnostic measurement layer above them.

Start by defining a small set of common KPIs that matter to your business. Then map each retailer’s metrics on to those outcomes, even if the inputs differ.

Use normalization to make results comparable: standardize time windows, attribution logic where possible and report everything on a per £1, per household or per 1,000 impressions basis.

And, crucially, stick to one source of truth. Retailer dashboards are for optimization; your internal framework is for decision-making. If you don’t make that distinction, you’ll always be optimizing locally but losing globally.

4. How do I reach ‘off-site’ audiences effectively?

Commerce media isn’t just about ads on a retailer’s website; it’s about using that retailer’s data to find people elsewhere – on social media, open web, or CTV and so on. So use that data to target smarter, use brand creative to grow demand, and use incrementality to prove value.

Start with high-intent audiences. Think recent buyers, lapsed buyers, category browsers and switchers, built from retailer data and activated through a small number of trusted partners across paid social, online video and CTV. Prioritize reach and quality over hyper-granularity: you’re trying to create future demand, not just chase yesterday’s shoppers.

Creative matters more off-site. Use retailer context to inform messaging (benefits, use cases, reasons to choose), but don’t turn every ad into a product tile. Off-site is where you build memory, not just clicks.

And make sure your measurement strategy mirrors that creative intent: track incremental reach, brand and consideration lift, and downstream sales impact, not just clickthrough rates. Top of Form

5. How do I balance short-term gains with long-term brand health?

Ah – that age-old tension. Which way do you lean? Well, both.

Ringfence part of your budget for future demand: new-to-brand acquisition, penetration growth, and mental availability. That means investing in upper- and mid-funnel commerce formats like off-site video, retail media display, and product discovery, even if the ROAS looks weaker in the short term.

At the same time, protect profitability by measuring contribution, not just revenue: margin-adjusted ROAS, incrementality, and the lifetime value of buyers you acquire.

The goal isn’t to choose between growth and efficiency. It’s to manage both deliberately, using commerce media not just to sell more today, but to make tomorrow’s sales easier, cheaper and more resilient.

Commerce media is moving fast. The Drum Awards for Commerce Media are here to recognize the work keeping pace – and setting the standard. Join us in Miami in April as part of The Drum’s year-round Commerce Media program. Learn more and enter.