Your brand invests heavily in a retail media network, launches ads across premium placements, and monitors the dashboard to see impressive click-through rates and sales. But when your quarterly brand tracker rolls in, awareness hasn’t moved, consideration is flat, and long-term preference is lost. Advertisers have realized that retail media KPIs still don’t fully capture brand impact.
Sales metrics rarely reflect the lift in brand equity, cultural relevance, or future purchase intent. They do little to quantify how retail placements shift perception or drive long-term loyalty. This measurement gap is a strategic misalignment. While brands aim to nurture lifetime value, retail media are engineered to reward quick wins.
This article discusses the misalignment between retail media KPIs and brand objectives.
Why Retail Media KPIs Are Misaligned with Brand Goals
Here are the main reasons retail media KPIs remain misaligned with brand goals.
1. Overemphasis on BOFU Metrics
Retail media optimizes conversions, ROAS, and last-click attribution.
Example: A software company may run a campaign focused exclusively on demo sign-ups, not multi-stakeholder influence.
2. Measurement is Based on Transactional Data
Because retailers own first-party purchase data, their frameworks default to transactional attribution. Rarely, if ever, will third-party brand lift tools be integrated with nor sentiment measurement.
Example: An industrial equipment manufacturer advertises through a major wholesaler’s retail media platform. The dashboard shows more cart additions but fails to track that improvement.
3. Lack of Visibility into Multi-Touch Influence
Retail media is often a single touchpoint in a decision journey where deals involve long sales cycles and multiple stakeholders. Yet, most KPIs still credit only for the final purchase.
Example: A cybersecurity product marketed on a distributor’s marketplace is measured solely on direct conversions, not the influence it had on earlier-stage research.
4. Creative Impact and Storytelling Undervalued
Retail media formats only do sponsor listings, product tiles, and targeted banners. These formats are not optimized for narrative impact. KPIs reflect that.
Example: A cloud solutions company runs a high-quality video campaign about innovation. The retail media platform only measures CTR; not recall or awareness.
5. Limited Integration with Brand Frameworks
Brand leaders use metrics such as preference, NPS, and category leadership. The data provided by retail media networks rarely align with these.
When Should Brands Redefine Their Success Metrics in Retail Media?
Below are the moments when brands should revisit and redefine how they measure success.
1. When Retail Media Shifts to Strategic Investment
Once retail media becomes core, brands need to refresh their KPIs to reflect their ambition.
Example: When a SaaS company moves from ABM ads to an ABM program, measurement must evolve beyond MQLs to pipeline influence.
2. When Brand-Building is a Priority
If a brand is focusing on equity or market share, sales KPIs alone are not good enough.
Example: A cybersecurity company that is expanding into new markets cannot only focus on demo requests; it has to create awareness and trust indicators.
3. When Retail Media Networks Introduce New Formats
In their expansion of video, streaming ads, and off-site capabilities, retailers are increasingly requiring full-funnel KPIs, not just ROAS KPIs.
Example: When a cloud provider adopts LinkedIn video campaigns, metrics shift from lead-gen to sentiment lift.
4. When Product Categories are Evolved
In categories where decision-making takes longer, short-term conversions don’t reflect actual impact.
Example: IT deals have longer cycles, which makes last-click attribution meaningless when not using engagement scoring.
6. When Retail Media KPIs Indicate Diminishing Returns
A plateau in ROAS or rising customer acquisition costs is a signal that more blended KPIs are needed.
Example: When cost-per-opportunity spikes, leadership looks toward account engagement or pipeline velocity.
7. When the Internal Stakeholders Demand ROI Narratives
Finance, sales, and product teams want a more strategic story than “ROAS improved”.
Example: Revenue teams want attribution across the buying group, not just isolated touchpoints.
What Role Do Retailers Play in Creating Unified Reporting Standards?
The following are the responsibilities retailers must embrace to facilitate standardization of measurement.
1. Establish Consistent KPI Frameworks
Retailers need to agree on a universal set of retail media KPIs.
Example: Much like marketing automation platforms adopted standardized metrics such as MQL, SQL, and pipeline influence.
2. Establishing Data Definitions
Retailers should provide clarity on how they calculate impressions, conversions, and attribution windows.
Example: Cloud platforms standardizing definitions for “active user” and “engaged account”.
3. Cross-Retailer Data Enablement
Retail media should support APIs, shared schemas, and integrations that will help brands assess performance across multiple retailers.
Example: Intent data providers integrate into CRM and MAP for unified account-level visibility.
4. Introducing Third-party Verification Support
Brands should let retailers enable independent measurement partners to validate reach, view, and transparency.
Example: Just like cybersecurity vendors adopting third-party audits to validate compliance claims.
5. The Brand Performance Views
Retail media will need to evolve from product metrics towards insights that capture brand lift, category influence, and long-term value.
Example: ABM platforms that are moving away from click data toward account penetration, sentiment analysis, and buying group engagement metrics.
6. Aligning Incentives with Transactional Metrics
Specifically, retailers need to support KPIs reflecting both brand impact and sales outcomes.
Example: Teams balancing immediate lead-gen targets with long-term brand equity and market awareness.
Conclusion
The disconnection between retail media KPIs and brand objectives causes friction in the way brands invest in and measure their presence. Retail media will only reach its full potential when KPIs evolve to reflect both the transactions and the brand equity that shape tomorrow. Let’s build KPIs that track not just what converts, but what elevates your brand.
