Retail media has grown to $155 billion globally despite a significant measurement problem. Every retailer has its own metrics, its own attribution window, its own definition of a conversion. Cross-retailer campaign comparisons are difficult. Benchmarking is unreliable. The lack of standardisation has been a genuine barrier to incremental investment — and it’s now getting serious attention.
The Current State of the Problem
Attribution windows vary: some retailers count a conversion as anything that happens within 7 days of an ad click; others use 14 or 30-day windows. A campaign can look dramatically different depending purely on the window applied. Incrementality is inconsistently defined — most retail media reporting shows total sales attributable to an ad exposure without separating sales that would have happened anyway. Cross-retailer reporting doesn’t exist: if you’re running campaigns on Amazon, Walmart, Tesco, and Carrefour simultaneously, you’re looking at four separate reporting interfaces with incompatible metrics.
What’s Being Done About It
The IAB has been working on retail media measurement standards, and IAB Europe published the first retail media measurement standards framework in 2023, providing common definitions for key metrics and attribution methodology requirements. Technology platforms are responding — a growing ecosystem of retail media measurement tools from established ad verification companies (IAS, DoubleVerify) to specialist analytics platforms is building infrastructure to help brands aggregate and compare performance across networks.
Why Solving This Unlocks Growth
A meaningful cohort of brands has held back substantial retail media investment because they can’t get comfortable with measurement quality. As standardisation improves, those budgets will move. For marketers: don’t wait for perfect measurement before investing. Build internal retail media analytics capabilities now, establish your own measurement frameworks and incrementality testing protocols, and treat each retailer’s reporting as one signal among several. The brands building these capabilities now will have a structural advantage when standardisation eventually arrives.