Retail Media - Happydemics' Blog

Brand lift in retail media: the unsung hero

Marion Chauviere — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 10:40:52 +0000

It’s no surprise that retail media is absorbing a larger share of marketing budgets each year, or that analysts project continued double-digit growth across global markets. Worldwide investment with retail media networks (RMNs) is set to reach $174.9bn this year.

Yet despite this momentum, retail media is still measured predominantly through the same narrow set of performance metrics: ROAS, conversion rate, click-throughs, and product-level sales. These numbers matter. No channel sits closer to the point of purchase, but they only reveal part of the story.

Focusing solely on sales ignores a powerful truth: retail media also shapes how shoppers think, feel, and remember a brand long before they hit “add to cart.”

That’s where retail media brand lift becomes the unsung hero, a metric that captures the full impact of retail media by revealing the brand outcomes it creates behind the scenes.

Why Retail Media Needs Brand Lift, Not Just ROAS

Performance numbers tell you what happened, but brand lift explains why it happened and what could happen next.

Retail media’s influence stretches far beyond last-click attribution. Whether shoppers encounter a sponsored product on page one, a promoted banner in a retailer’s app, or a category takeover on an e-commerce homepage, these touchpoints have a significant impact on:

Brand awareness
Brand recall
Message association
Consideration and preference

In other words, retail media does more than drive conversion, it builds mental availability at the exact moment shoppers are making decisions.

Ignoring brand lift means undervaluing your investment. A campaign might look “low ROAS” on paper but actually deliver a substantial rise in brand perceptions that fuels future sales, repeat purchases, and loyalty. Without measurement, these effects remain invisible.

What Is Brand Lift in Retail Media?

Brand lift in retail media measures the change in consumer perception after exposure to a retail media campaign. It answers headline questions like:

Do shoppers now recognise the brand more easily?
Did the ad improve brand preference?
Are shoppers more likely to consider the brand on their next visit?

Unlike ROAS, which captures immediate transactional behaviour, brand lift captures incremental shifts in mindset; the invisible progress that drives long-term market share growth.

Retail media is particularly influential here because consumers are usually highly attentive. They’re actively looking for a product and are close to choice-making moments. They’re essentially primed to react to well delivered advertising.

Measuring brand lift helps you to understand how your retail media is shaping the shoppers’ behaviours beyond the sale itself.

Why Brand Lift Is the Unsung Hero of Retail Media

Retail media sits uniquely at the intersection of branding and performance. Both the power of the brand itself, and the strategic placement of relevant products move the needle for retailers. Here’s why:

1. Retail Media Influences the Entire Funnel

Shoppers exposed to retail media ads often show improvements in awareness, recall and message reinforcement before they ever click or buy. This upper-funnel value is rarely recorded in commerce dashboards.

Each retail media channel brings its own strengths to brand building. Online and display formats perform strongly on ad recall and attribution, ensuring clear brand visibility. DOOH drives higher interest, message clarity, and brand familiarity, while CTV excels in boosting ad likeability and brand image. Social ads effectively increase preference and consideration, and display is particularly powerful for triggering specific intent actions such as testing, buying, or recommending a product. Together, these strengths show why a multi-channel retail media mix is essential for full-funnel impact.

2. It Strengthens Future Sales Potential

Brand lift signals a campaign’s contribution to long-term growth. Even if short-term sales are modest, strong lift often correlates with category expansion. 50% of consumers are more likely to buy from a brand they recognise.

3. It Uncovers Hidden Incrementality

Sponsored products, on-site display and off-site extensions all influence perception, sometimes even when consumers don’t click. Brand lift reveals these effects clearly.

4. It Helps You Optimise Retail Media Budgets Wisely

With lift data, brands can compare which retailers, formats, placements or audiences generate the most meaningful impact, not just the most efficient clicks.

5. It Creates a More Balanced View of Success

Retail media isn’t a “performance-only” channel. Brand lift embeds strategic thinking into a space that has long been dominated by ROAS and CPC.

How to Measure Brand Lift in Retail Media

Measuring retail media brand lift requires an approach rooted in real consumer feedback, not platform-level assumptions. The gold standard is an exposed vs control brand lift study, applied specifically to retail environments.

1. Identify the Exposed Group

These are shoppers who have seen the retail media campaign, whether through sponsored listings, banners, on-site media, or off-site programmatic extensions.

2. Build a Matched Control Group

A similar audience that was not exposed to the campaign. This isolates the incremental impact of the retail media activity itself.

3. Ask Both Groups the Same Brand Questions

Typically covering:

Brand awareness
Brand recall
Message association
Consideration
Preference

The difference between the two groups reveals the brand lift generated by the campaign.

4. Analyse Results by Placement, Audience, and Format

This helps marketers understand which touchpoints do the most heavy lifting for the brand.

To find out more about brand lift methodologies, read our article that delves deeper into the different ways you can measure lift.

Why Measurement Helps Advertisers Perform

Retail media measurement is notoriously fragmented. Data often sits within retailer walled gardens, performance metrics are not standardised, and off-site campaign impact is difficult to attribute.

Without brand lift measurement, advertisers often rely too heavily on ROAS as the single KPI. And with limited visibility into upper-funnel impact across retailers, this can lead to underestimation of campaigns.

Brand lift provides the missing layer that ties these pieces together. It turns retail media into a strategic channel, not just a performance one.

The post Brand lift in retail media: the unsung hero first appeared on Happydemics' Blog.

Retail media analytics and benchmarks for 2026

Marion Chauviere — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 16:16:10 +0000

Retail media has moved from a promising innovation to one of the fastest-growing and most strategically critical advertising channels. As retailers like Amazon, Walmart, Carrefour, and Tesco transform their digital ecosystems into powerful media networks, brands are shifting increasing budget toward formats that blend commerce, data, and consumer proximity. But with rapid growth comes complexity: fragmented measurement standards, inconsistent KPIs, and varied capabilities across networks.

In 2026, retail media analytics has become essential for advertisers who need more than impressions and sales—they want unified measurement, credible benchmarks, and a clear understanding of how retail media contributes to brand equity, not just transactions.

What Is Retail Media Analytics?

Retail media analytics refers to the measurement, analysis, and optimization of advertising delivered on retailer-owned platforms and networks. This includes on-site placements (sponsored products, display ads, shoppable videos), off-site activations powered by retailer data (programmatic audiences, social integrations), and in-store media such as digital screens or point-of-sale displays.

What makes retail media unique is the consolidation of three critical elements within a single ecosystem:

Media – The ad placements reaching shoppers during high-intent moments.
Commerce – Direct access to transaction and product-level conversion data.
First-party shopper data – Audience insights grounded in real purchasing behaviour, not third-party cookies or probabilistic identifiers.

Unlike traditional digital media, retail media analytics goes beyond ad performance to tie exposure directly to shopping impact. At the same time, it extends beyond lower-funnel metrics: 2025’s most mature advertisers evaluate not only sales but brand awareness, consideration, and incremental impact—metrics that help explain why campaigns succeed, not just how much they sold.

Why Benchmarks Matter in Retail Media

As retail media matures, advertisers increasingly rely on retail media benchmarks to evaluate investment. Benchmarks help marketers compare performance across networks with very different formats and data structures, set realistic expectations, justify budget allocation by demonstrating efficiency versus other channels and identify optimization opportunities, such as high-performing SKUs or creative formats.

Yet the industry lacks standardization. Each retailer offers its own reporting suite, definitions, and KPIs, making cross-channel comparison difficult. This fragmentation means advertisers often operate without a clear baseline.

In 2026, brands are demanding:

Unified metrics and independent verification
Comparable benchmarks across retailers and categories
Visibility into both short-term sales and long-term brand impact

Retail media analytics is evolving quickly to meet this need, backed by a growing expectation for transparency and neutral measurement partners who are not monetised by media spend.

Core KPIs for Retail Media Measurement

Retail media performance can be organized into four major KPI categories. The brands leading in 2026 are those balancing them cohesively rather than optimizing only for ROAS.

1. Sales and Conversion Metrics

These KPIs remain foundational — but they no longer tell the full story.

ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) – Still the most common metric.
Cost per sale / cost per incremental unit sold
Conversion rate
Basket size and cross-sell impact
Share of category (on retailer platform)

While conversion data is powerful, it is increasingly contextualized with incrementality testing to distinguish causal impact from baseline demand.

2. Audience Engagement Metrics

Beyond sales, engagement KPIs help advertisers understand how well their ads drive attention and interaction.

Impressions
Click-through rate (CTR)
Viewability
Dwell time on product pages
Add-to-cart rate

In 2026, attention metrics—how long a user actively engages with a placement—are gaining ground as retailers integrate eye-tracking models and real-world behavioral data.

3. Brand Metrics

This is where the industry is evolving fastest. Retail media is no longer seen only as a performance channel; it’s becoming a brand impact channel.

Key brand KPIs include: Brand awareness lift, Brand favorability lift, Consideration lift, Purchase intent

Brands increasingly run brand lift studies to measure how exposure within retail networks influences perception, even when immediate sales remain modest.

Retail media delivering deeper brand value: campaigns generate a +2-point lift in specific brand image compared to the average of all other media strategies and a +4-point increase in specific purchase intent. These gains show that retail media is no longer just a conversion engine — it actively shapes brand perception and future demand. To capture this added value, advertisers must integrate KPIs such as brand awareness, brand image, and intent into their measurement frameworks, ensuring they recognise the full extent of retail media’s impact.

4. Incrementality and Attribution Metrics

These KPIs reveal what would (or would not) have happened without the campaign:

Incremental sales
Incremental reach
Audience overlap between retail networks
Multi-touch attribution (MTA) models
Geo-based or cohort-based lift testing

2026 marks a shift toward independent incrementality measurement — brands want results validated by partners who do not operate the retail media inventory.

Retail Media Benchmarks for 2026

While benchmarks vary by category, retailer, and market, here are the dominant trends shaping retail media measurement in 2026.

1. ROI and ROAS Expectations Become More Nuanced

ROAS is no longer the universal indicator of retail media success. Many advertisers now separate:

Immediate ROAS (sales during campaign)
Delayed ROAS (sales uplift 2–6 weeks later)
Incremental ROAS (net additional value created)

Categories with lower purchase frequency (beauty, home care) increasingly rely on brand lift benchmarks instead of purely transactional ones.

2. CPMs Continue to Rise — but Value Justification Improves

Retail media CPMs have increased year over year due to higher advertiser demand, richer first-party data and new immersive formats (video, sponsored content).

In 2026, advertisers expect higher CPMs to be paired with better shopper insights, improved targeting precision, and more transparent performance metrics.

3. Off-Site Retail Media Surges

Retailers are expanding off-site activations using their shopper data on programmatic display, Connected TV (CTV), Social platforms and Retail search on third-party apps.

This creates cross-channel measurement challenges—but also opportunities to evaluate full-funnel impact, especially for awareness and consideration.

4. Attention Metrics Move Into the Mainstream

Advertisers increasingly benchmark average dwell time, interaction rate, scroll depth, eye-visible exposure duration. Attention is increasingly recognized as a strong indicator of future outcomes, particularly when it comes to brand lift. When running a brand lift study, it becomes essential to evaluate several layers of brand recognition: how well consumers attribute the ad to the correct brand, how effectively the targeting drives genuine interest, and—most importantly—whether people actually remember the ad. Ad recall is a decisive signal, as it reveals whether the creative elements were distinctive and impactful enough to stand out in a crowded retail media environment.

5. Brand Lift Becomes an Expected KPI

Retail media is maturing into a true full-funnel channel. As a result, brand lift studies are no longer “nice to have”—they are a requirement for evaluating:

Creative effectiveness
Ad recall
Attribution to the brand
Ad placement quality
Consumer perception change
Category disruption potential

Retailers are responding by making it easier to integrate third-party survey-based research providers.

Recent performance data reinforces just how important it has become for advertisers to look beyond pure sales metrics and integrate brand-focused KPIs into their retail media analytics.

Compared with 2024, retail media campaigns in 2025–2026 are significantly better targeted, driving stronger consumer impact across the full funnel. Ad recall is up +3 points, demonstrating improved visibility and memorability of placements. Attribution clarity has risen by +6 points, reflecting a more accurate understanding of how retail media contributes to overall brand performance.

6. Demand for Independent Measurement Rises

With retailers owning both the inventory and the data, advertisers seek:

Neutral, non-monetised measurement
Cross-retailer visibility
Standardized metrics that can be compared fairly

This shift is one of the most important dynamics shaping 2026’s retail media analytics ecosystem.

How to Build a Retail Media Analytics Framework

To evaluate retail media holistically, advertisers in 2026 use a balanced framework that combines performance, brand, and incrementality.

1. Define Objectives Across All Stages of the Funnel

Retail media can generate: Awareness, a better Brand Perception, Consideration, Conversion, Loyalty.

Each stage requires dedicated KPIs and benchmarks.

2. Combine Short-Term Sales With Long-Term Brand Metrics

Relying solely on ROAS leads to underinvestment in brand-driving formats such as video. A modern framework integrates:

Conversion KPIs → to understand immediate sales impact
Brand lift KPIs → to understand perception shifts
Attention KPIs → to assess creative quality and engagement

This creates a comprehensive view of advertising effectiveness.

3. Standardize KPIs Across Retail Networks

Even if retailers report differently, advertisers can develop internal consistency by aligning definitions for impressions, new-to-brand sales, incremental units, awareness lift.

This enables fairer cross-network comparisons.

4. Adopt an Always-On Measurement Layer

2026 leaders embed measurement across every campaign, ensuring continuity in Brand Performance and Lift, shopper behaviour monitoring , share-of-search and share-of-category analytics, creative performance insights.

This turns retail media into a predictable, optimizable channel — not a black box.

How Happydemics Measures Retail Media Performance

In a landscape where retailers control data access and standards vary widely, advertisers increasingly turn to neutral measurement partners for unbiased insights.

Happydemics provides a transparent, survey-based measurement approach designed specifically for cross-retail comparability. Key advantages include:

1. Independent, Non-Monetized Measurement

Happydemics does not monetize media, ensuring neutrality in:

Brand lift studies
Awareness and consideration KPIs
Creative effectiveness analysis
Cross-retailer benchmarks

Advertisers receive insights without platform bias.

2. Consumer-Based Brand Metrics

Instead of relying solely on retailer-side data, Happydemics measures:

Real consumer awareness
Perceived brand quality
Consideration likelihood
Purchase intent
Ad recall across retailer environments

This provides a more complete view of advertising effectiveness in retail media.

3. Cross-Retail Media Visibility

Because retailers report differently, Happydemics offers a unified methodology that works across Amazon, Walmart, Carrefour, Ocado, Target, Retail media networks across Europe, the U.S., APAC, and LATAM.

Advertisers can finally benchmark performance across markets and networks using consistent KPIs.

4. Full-Funnel Measurement

This includes:

Brand lift
Attention KPIs (Attribution, Ad recall and Interest)
Creative diagnosis
Self-reported purchase behaviour
Brand perception shifts

By connecting these brand insights with retailer performance KPIs, Happydemics helps advertisers understand the true value of their retail media investment — not just the transactional outcomes.

Conclusion

As retail media enters a new phase of maturity, robust retail media analytics and clear benchmarks are critical for navigating a fragmented and rapidly evolving ecosystem. In 2026, advertisers need frameworks that balance:

Sales performance
Brand impact
Attention quality
Incremental value
Cross-retailer comparability

Brands that master these dimensions will not only measure better—they will plan smarter, invest more efficiently, and unlock the full potential of retail media as a growth engine.

The post Retail media analytics and benchmarks for 2026 first appeared on Happydemics' Blog.