Creating a Blueprint for Attribution and Measurement in Commerce Media

The rapid proliferation of retail media networks has created a critical measurement challenge for advertisers. With hundreds of media networks operating globally, brands face a fragmented landscape.

Currently, inconsistent attribution models make it difficult to understand true performance across platforms. Data fragmentation also makes it challenging to identify customers, so brands can attribute revenue and sales directly to their marketing efforts.

This measurement chaos threatens to undermine the promise of closed-loop attribution that originally made retail media so attractive to marketers. Here, we’ll explore how brands can overcome these challenges and offer an example of one brand that has seen success.

The Unique Attribution Challenges of Commerce Media

Attribution and measurement are two of the most significant challenges in the commerce media ecosystem. The key drivers of this challenge are platform fragmentation, complexity across channels, and a lack of data quality, governance, or availability.

Platform Fragmentation and Inconsistency

The retail media ecosystem suffers from a fundamental lack of standardization that creates significant measurement challenges for brands.

According to one marketing leader who spoke at Commerce Media Brand Summit (CMBS) 2025, each platform operates with different attribution windows.

"Some run seven-day attribution windows, while others run fourteen-day or twenty-eight-day attribution windows,” said one speaker. "Some include calculation returns within their attribution reports, and some don’t, depending on the category. This makes comparing the performance of retail media networks side by side very difficult.”

While measurement inconsistencies compound financial pressures on brands, platform bias further complicates attribution accuracy. Each retail media network naturally favors reporting methodologies that inflate its own performance metrics.

Excluding attribution calculations can create artificial performance variations that have nothing to do with actual campaign effectiveness. This fragmentation forces brands to operate in silos rather than developing holistic commerce media strategies.

Cross-Channel Attribution Complexity

Modern shoppers seamlessly move between online and offline channels during their purchase journey, but retail media platforms struggle to capture this omnichannel behavior.

Off-site advertising adds another layer of complexity to attribution tracking. For example, connected TV and other upper-funnel activities are difficult to measure within traditional retail media frameworks. Mobile app interactions often remain invisible to retail media platforms, creating significant blind spots in the customer journey.

"The beautiful thing about offsite advertising is that it expands your audience; it takes your brand to new places to drive the commerce experience,” said one commerce media expert at CMBS 2025.

"However, as the world evolves, we're leaning into what a true attribution means. We've had limited views of attribution, and it hasn’t been holistic to look across multiple platforms or even multiple touch points within a retailer.”

Data Quality and Accessibility Issues

First-party data silos between retailers and brands represent perhaps the greatest barrier to effective attribution.

According to a report 2025 by CMBS Insights called First-Party Data Strategies in Commerce Media: An Industry Analysis, fragmented data silos or integration challenges represent the most common internal barrier to fully leveraging first-party data in retail media planning and optimization, cited by 53% of organizations. Limited data sharing agreements restrict the insights brands need for proper attribution, while real-time optimization suffers from data delays that can span days or weeks.

Privacy regulations add another layer of complexity, affecting cross-platform tracking capabilities and making it increasingly difficult to connect customer touchpoints across different retail environments.

Internal Measurement Gaps Are Holding Brands Back

Cross-channel data fragmentation is only one part of the attribution challenge. Brands investing in retail media advertising can also face measurement gaps due to a lack of internal standards across departments.

ROAS vs. Incrementality

Platform-reported return on ad spend (ROAS) frequently fails to reflect the true incremental returns of a brand’s spending. This creates a dangerous disconnect between reported performance and actual business impact.

"Platform-reported ROAS doesn't reflect true incremental lift,” explained one advertising leader at CMBS 2025. "There's double-counting across multiple retail media networks, and a lack of baseline establishment for proper measurement.”

Many brands fall into the trap of celebrating high ROAS numbers without understanding that they may simply be paying to reach customers who would have purchased anyway. This phenomenon is particularly problematic when multiple retail media networks claim credit for the same conversion.

According to a report by eMarketer, 71% of advertisers now cite incrementality as the most important KPI for evaluating success in commerce media. Ultimately, this inability to measure incrementality leads to artificially inflated performance metrics that mask inefficient spending.

Organizational Misalignment

Different teams managing retail media often operate with conflicting KPIs, creating friction that undermines measurement effectiveness in the brand.

According to speakers at CMBS 2025, trade teams typically focus on volume and velocity metrics, while marketing teams prioritize brand awareness and new customer acquisition. This makes it difficult to develop cohesive attribution strategies that serve the broader business objectives.

How Brands Can Build and Call for a Cohesive Attribution Framework

Brands must actively push for standardized retail media measurement guidelines adoption across their retail media network partners.

According to a report by Microsoft, the IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau) and MRC (Media Rating Council) recently "developed a modern measurement framework that encompasses retail media onsite, offsite, and in-store. The guidelines cover various aspects of retail media measurement, such as viewability, attribution, fraud prevention, data privacy, and auditing.”

However, adoption of these guidelines is not complete across the industry.

Advocating for Consistent Attribution Windows & Data Transparency

Brands should also encourage commerce media networks to establish consistent attribution windows aligned with their specific category behavior rather than accepting platform defaults. This would allow for more accurate and good-faith comparisons between networks, encouraging competition and winning more trust among advertisers.

Similarly, negotiating data transparency in retailer partnerships is critical for proper attribution. This requires brands to leverage their buying power to demand better measurement standards.

One advertising leader at CMBS 2025 put it bluntly:

"If you won’t share your data, you won’t get an investment from us. No data, no dollars.”

Advanced Measurement Implementation

Marketing mix modeling (MMM) provides brands with a holistic view that transcends individual platform reporting. When combined with incrementality testing through holdout groups and geo-testing, MMM helps brands understand true causal relationships between media investment and business outcomes.

Clean rooms offer secure cross-platform data sharing opportunities, though adoption remains limited due to complexity and integration challenges.

The integration of first-party data with retail media insights represents a critical capability for advanced measurement. According to CMBS Insights’ 2025 First-Party Data Strategies in Commerce Media report, 75% of organizations use first-party data for on-site retail media advertising and personalization, significantly outpacing off-site retail media network campaigns at 43%.

Organizational Excellence

Finally, the impetus is not only on retail media networks. Brands must develop specialized expertise within the organization to achieve attribution excellence.

Speakers at CMBS 2025 suggested brands "create centers of excellence for retail media measurement” and "establish cross-functional teams with aligned KPIs.”

Category-specific attribution frameworks would also help address the fact that different products require different measurement approaches. Lastly, by engaging in regular measurement audits and model refinements, brands can ensure that attribution systems evolve with changing market conditions and business needs.

Brand Spotlight: Unilever's Measurement Innovation Leadership

Unilever has emerged as an industry leader in retail media measurement innovation, pioneering strategies that other brands are beginning to emulate.

According to a 2025 report by MarTech, Unilever’s recent retail media network campaign for its Ben & Jerry’s ice cream brand succeeded in leveraging first-party data and tracking campaign performance.

The campaign's attribution success was thanks to a comprehensive measurement framework that tracked multiple performance indicators across the consumer journey. Unilever and its retail partners successfully measured a 1.5x return on ad spend that exceeded initial projections. They also witnessed a 26x greater return than their partners’ typical audience return on ad spend.

Most significantly, the campaign demonstrated 94% lower cost per acquisition than traditional methods. This indicated that the attribution model successfully identified and reached the desired Gen Z and millennial audience segments who were most likely to explore new flavors.

Conclusion: The Path Forward for Commerce Media Measurement

The future belongs to brands that master attribution complexity rather than avoiding it. Investment in measurement infrastructure delivers long-term dividends that compound as commerce media continues to expand and mature. Industry collaboration remains essential for advancing measurement standards, but brands cannot wait for perfect solutions to emerge.

Success requires balancing short-term performance optimization with long-term brand building, recognizing that effective attribution must capture both immediate sales impact and sustained customer value creation. The brands that solve attribution challenges today will dominate commerce media tomorrow.