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Marketers evaluating retail media should look beyond the number of networks, placements, and reported return on ad spend (ROAS). Prioritize whether a proposal can demonstrate incremental business impact, report results transparently across relevant channels, and fit the team’s ability to operate and measure it. A retailer-attributed ROAS figure describes credited sales; it does not, by itself, prove that advertising caused additional sales.
What should marketers value in retail media now?
The industry conversation is shifting from rapid expansion toward execution: sustainable business models, measurable outcomes, and cross-channel operation. That is IAB’s strategic framing, not a proven forecast of what every market or network will do. IAB identifies incremental impact measurement, connection of media investment to commerce outcomes across digital and physical channels, standardization, and interoperability as capabilities for commerce media networks seeking to scale. IAB’s April 2026 guidance sets out that direction.
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Buyer priorities offer a practical starting point, with an important geographic limit. In IAB Europe’s 2025 survey of more than 180 advertisers, agencies, and retail media networks across 31 markets, transparency and reporting were evaluation criteria for 82% of respondents, performance for 76%, and measurement options for 75%. These are European survey findings, not global market estimates. The July 2025 survey reports the figures.
Use those priorities to judge what a network can demonstrate, not simply what it offers. A polished dashboard is useful only if its metrics, attribution rules, time windows, and data coverage are clear enough to support a decision.
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How can you tell whether retail media drove incremental sales?
Incrementality asks what happened because the advertising ran, compared with a credible estimate of what would have happened without it. ROAS is a ratio of attributed sales to media cost; it can be useful for performance reporting, but attribution alone does not establish that those sales were additional. A shopper may have purchased anyway, or a campaign may have received credit for a sale influenced by other activity.
When a network presents a result as incremental, ask how it constructed that comparison, what biases or noise could affect it, and whether the method fits the decision. IAB and IAB Europe’s 2025 incremental measurement guidance describes experiments, model-based counterfactuals, econometric models, and hybrid proxies. It emphasizes credible counterfactuals, control of bias, and separating signal from noise. These approaches are not interchangeable: the appropriate level of causal rigor depends on whether the task is campaign optimization, ROI validation, or platform calibration.
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Questions to put to a network
- What is the counterfactual? Ask which shoppers, markets, periods, or modeled outcomes represent the no-advertising comparison.
- How is bias addressed? Ask how selection effects, other campaigns, seasonality, and other plausible influences are handled.
- What exactly counts as a sale? Confirm whether the reported outcome is gross or net sales, which products and channels are included, and what attribution or lookback window applies.
- Can the result support the decision you need to make? A campaign-level causal estimate, a standardized network report, and a long-range portfolio model answer different questions.
- What are the limits? Ask about sample size, uncertainty, data access, and whether results cover online, in-store, or both.
In the 2025 IAB Europe survey, 88% of respondents said they wanted ROAS as a metric, 71% wanted incrementality, and 58% wanted campaign-level and unified online/offline reporting. The same survey summary said 71% of networks offered ROAS at the time. That difference is a reason to request a clear measurement specification; it does not show that every ROAS report is unreliable. The survey is based on European industry respondents, not a census of networks or buyers worldwide.
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Choose measurement for the decision, not the label
Measurement tools serve different purposes. IAB commentary recommends causal methods for closed-loop campaign decisions and describes marketing mix modeling (MMM) as useful for longer-range portfolio planning and broader media-mix scenarios. That is expert commentary, not a universal rule that makes one method suitable for every business. IAB’s commentary makes the distinction.
IAB’s October 2024 advanced measurement guide names randomized controlled trials, match-market testing, counterfactual models, MMM, shadow-mode testing, and data clean rooms among relevant techniques or infrastructure. Treat this as a menu, not a list of interchangeable solutions: some approaches estimate campaign lift, some support broader planning, and some enable privacy-conscious collaboration rather than measuring impact by themselves.
- For campaign impact: seek an experiment or another credible causal design where practical, with a defined comparison and a result tied to the campaign objective.
- For comparing networks: align definitions, sales scope, reporting windows, and channel coverage before comparing results.
- For portfolio planning: use broader modeling where it fits the planning horizon, and do not mistake a portfolio-level estimate for proof that one campaign caused a particular sale.
Make network proposals comparable
Standard definitions can make reports easier to interpret, but they cannot make different retailers’ inventory, audiences, or business models identical. IAB Europe’s January 2026 update to its Commerce (Incl. Retail) Media Measurement Standards added a clearer measurement funnel, gross and net sales definitions, quick-commerce metrics, an incrementality definition with approved methods, and updated new-to-brand and new-to-category timeframes. It described 30 days as the default reporting lookback, with flexible customized options. The standards announcement also stated a V1/V2 transition grace period through the end of July 2026; that period has passed. Check the standards page for current certification status before making a present-tense compliance claim.
Use a common scorecard to expose differences rather than forcing a single headline metric to carry the whole decision.
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| Comparison area | What to establish | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Business outcome | The objective, outcome metric, and decision the measurement is meant to support. | A metric only has value if it addresses the business question. |
| Definitions and transparency | Gross or net sales; included products and channels; attribution and lookback windows; reporting cadence. | Different definitions can make superficially similar results incomparable. |
| Causal rigor | The counterfactual, method, assumptions, and treatment of bias and uncertainty. | Shows whether a result supports an incremental-impact claim or only attributed performance. |
| Channel coverage | On-site, off-site, in-store, and any unified online/offline reporting included. | Coverage determines what the result represents and which channels are visible. |
| Audience and data collaboration | Available audience capabilities, data access, privacy constraints, and collaboration requirements. | These affect both what can be measured and what the team can activate. |
| Operational fit | Creative requirements, reporting workflow, partner coordination, and the team’s capacity to manage the relationship. | A theoretically attractive network may be difficult to run effectively at scale. |
IAB Europe’s January 2026 announcement also introduced four flexible aspect ratios for static display ads, intended to reduce fragmentation in retail media creative formats. That may matter when estimating production and trafficking effort, but it is an operational consideration—not evidence of business impact.
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Retail media is diversifying beyond on-site placements, but the available figures describe survey responses and budget allocations—not marketwide spending totals. In IAB Europe’s 2025 survey, more than 90% of respondents allocated at least 41% of their digital retail media budget to on-site formats. The share allocating at least 41% to off-site formats rose from 30% to 46%. These figures suggest that off-site activity is gaining weight among surveyed respondents while on-site remains central; they do not establish the channel mix for all advertisers. The survey provides the underlying context.
More partners are not automatically better. The same survey found that the share of buyers working with four to six networks rose from 10% to 24%, while engagement with ten or more networks remained steady. Partnerships lasting more than a year increased from 50% to 63%. These are survey comparisons, not evidence of an ideal network count or proof that longer partnerships perform better.
Before adding a network, ask whether it brings incremental reach, audiences, inventory, or measurement capability that existing partners cannot provide—and whether your team can manage the extra creative, reporting, and data workflows. The right portfolio depends on those trade-offs, not a universal target number.
Use a practical evaluation sequence
- Write down the decision first. Specify whether you need to optimize a campaign, validate incremental return, compare networks, or plan a longer-term media mix.
- Define the outcome. Agree on the sales or business result, the products and channels included, and whether the figure is attributed or intended to estimate incrementality.
- Request the measurement design. Ask for the counterfactual, method, assumptions, bias controls, and uncertainty—not just a dashboard screenshot or headline ROAS.
- Align reporting terms. Compare sales definitions, lookback windows, new-to-brand or new-to-category rules, and reporting cadence. Where a standard applies, confirm which version and current certification status the network uses.
- Map channel and data coverage. Establish whether the proposal includes on-site, off-site, in-store, or unified reporting, and what privacy and access limits apply to collaboration.
- Check operational capacity. Include creative specifications, workflow demands, and the effort needed to coordinate another partner.
- Compare the proposals against the same scorecard. Weight the criteria according to the decision and business priorities; do not assume one metric or weighting fits every advertiser.
What the evidence can—and cannot—tell you
The buyer percentages cited here come from IAB Europe’s 2025 survey of more than 180 respondents across 31 markets, including advertisers, agencies, and retail media networks; at least 75% of respondents managed annual advertising budgets of €1 million or more. They describe those respondents, not all marketers or global spend. The 2026 IAB statements describe strategic industry guidance, while the January 2026 standards announcement concerns a European standards revision. Neither is proof that every network has already adopted consistent measurement or cross-channel operations.
As IAB’s Collin Colburn, VP, Commerce & Retail Media, put it: “The next chapter will be defined by rigor and by how well companies translate proximity-to-transaction into measurable, sustained performance.” IAB’s April 14, 2026 announcement places that statement in the context of the industry’s move toward measurable outcomes and cross-channel execution.
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