Retail Media Networks (RMNs) have become one of marketing’s fastest-growing investment areas. The challenge is no longer proving they work, it is agreeing on how to measure whether they worked.
Across APAC, retailers, marketplaces, and commerce platforms are expanding their media businesses, while brands continue shifting larger portions of trade and digital budgets into retail environments.
As investment has grown, so has confidence in the channel.
Yet a different challenge is beginning to emerge.
Imagine two retail media campaigns. One reports a 6x ROAS, the other 4x. The first appears to be the stronger investment, until one includes a 30-day attribution window, the other measures only online purchases, and neither indicates whether the sales would have happened anyway.
The numbers look comparable. The methodologies are not.
This is becoming one of APACretail media’s biggest maturity challenges. The issue is no longer whether RMNs generate results. It is whether the industry has a consistent way of defining what those results actually mean.
The Problem Is Not More Metrics. It Is Different Definitions of Success
RMNs are not short of measurement.
Every campaign produces detailed reporting on impressions, attributed sales, return on ad spend, basket value, customer acquisition, repeat purchase, and retailer-specific metrics designed to demonstrate platform performance.
The challenge begins when marketers try to compare those results across multiple networks.
A strong ROAS on one RMN cannot always be compared directly with a similar ROAS reported elsewhere. Attribution windows vary. Definitions of new-to-brand customers differ. Some retailers measure online transactions only, while others incorporate omnichannel purchases. Even metrics carrying the same name can be calculated using different methodologies.
Platform-reported performance remains valuable for optimizing campaigns within an individual network. But it becomes far less reliable as the basis for comparing investments across different RMNs or deciding where future budgets should move.
The issue is not a lack of measurement.
It is a lack of comparability.
For CMOs managing increasingly diversified retail media portfolios, that distinction matters. The real question is no longer which campaign performed best? Which investment created the greatest business value?
APAC’s Multi-Network Reality Makes Comparability Even More Important
This challenge becomes more pronounced as brands expand their retail media investments across multiple partners.
Recent industry research from IAB Australia found that seven in ten advertisers and agencies increased retail media investment over the past year, while 77% now work with three or more RMNs simultaneously. As portfolios expand, comparing performance consistently becomes significantly more difficult.
Across APAC, marketers face an even broader mix of retail ecosystems – from marketplaces and super apps to grocery retailers, quick-commerce platforms, and omnichannel businesses. Each generates valuable shopper intelligence, but each also applies its own reporting standards and measurement methodologies.
The result is an environment where marketers have more visibility than ever before, but not necessarily more clarity.
As retail media matures, the challenge shifts from accessing performance data to interpreting it consistently across an increasingly fragmented ecosystem.
From Platform Attribution to Decision-Grade Measurement
This is where the industry’s measurement conversation is beginning to evolve.
Historically, retail media reporting has focused on attribution – identifying which platform or campaign influenced a conversion. Attribution remains valuable for campaign optimization, but it does not always answer the broader commercial question marketers increasingly face:
Would this growth have happened anyway?
Answering that question requires a different layer of measurement.
Incrementality seeks to isolate the additional business value created by marketing activity rather than simply recording where a sale was observed. Increasingly, marketers are also complementing attribution with controlled experiments, lift studies, and causal measurement approaches that provide greater confidence when comparing investments across channels and platforms.
Importantly, this is not about replacing existing metrics.
It is about matching the measurement approach to the business decision being made. Platform metrics remain useful for optimization. Incrementality and causal evaluation become increasingly valuable when making investment, budgeting, and portfolio decisions.
As RMNs continue to mature, the ability to distinguish attributed outcomes from genuinely incremental growth will become an increasingly important source of competitive advantage.
What Brand as Performance Adds to the Conversation
This broader shift is reflected in MMA’s Brand as Performance (BAP) research.
Across studies involving brands such as Ally, Kroger, and Campbell’s, BAP demonstrates that traditional measurement approaches can significantly understate marketing’s contribution by focusing primarily on immediate outcomes. The research suggests that as much as 83% of marketing’s long-term impact may be overlooked when effectiveness is evaluated solely through short-term performance metrics. It also found that consumers with stronger brand favourability were four to five times more likely to convert, reinforcing the importance of measuring marketing’s broader commercial influence rather than immediate transactions alone.
BAP is not a retail media measurement framework, nor is it intended to standardize platform reporting..
It reinforces a principle that is becoming increasingly important for retail media: the most visible outcomes are not always the most valuable ones. Platform-reported sales represent one dimension of effectiveness. Understanding whether those sales were incremental, and how they contribute to longer-term business growth, provides a far more complete picture of marketing performance.
For marketers investing across multiple RMNs, that distinction is becoming increasingly important.
What CMOs Should Standardize Before They Scale
RMNs have reached a point where measurement maturity matters as much as media scale.
The next phase of growth will depend less on creating new inventory and more on helping marketers make confident investment decisions across an increasingly complex retail media landscape.
That does not necessarily require every RMN to measure performance in exactly the same way.
It does require greater consistency around the questions marketers ask before comparing results.
Before evaluating performance across networks, marketing leaders should establish a common measurement framework that addresses five fundamental questions:
- What business outcome is this campaign intended to influence?
- Which sales are included in the reported results, and over what attribution window?
- Are the reported outcomes attributed, incremental, or modelled?
- Does the measurement include only online transactions or broader omnichannel impact?
- Can these results be compared consistently with performance reported by other RMNs?
These questions are unlikely to eliminate complexity, but they create a common language for evaluating investment decisions across increasingly diverse retail media ecosystems.
RMNs have already demonstrated their ability to drive growth. The next stage of maturity will depend on giving marketers something equally valuable: confidence that performance is being measured consistently enough to make smarter decisions.
