Juan Baron, head of international and global accounts at Decentriq, explores one of the key challenges in retail media – how to prove incrementality.

Retail media has grown from an experiment into a budget line that sits beside search and social in many marketing plans. Scrutiny has followed, and brand leaders and finance teams now ask a fair question of every report they receive: how many of these sales would have happened anyway?

Retail media has a built-in measurement advantage. For onsite ads, the retailer sees both the ad exposure and the purchase, so closed-loop reporting is easy to produce and return on ad spend often looks excellent. Offsite and in-store sales rely on identity matching where it exists and on probabilistic modeling where it doesn’t, but the same attribution logic applies.

The weakness lies in what those figures count. Retail media reaches shoppers close to the point of purchase, when intent is already high. A shopper who searches for a product and then buys it from a sponsored listing is credited to the ad, even though many such purchases were going to happen anyway. Loyal customers and promotional periods inflate the picture further. Attribution records which purchases followed an exposure. Incrementality asks what changed because the ad ran.

Incrementality rests on a counterfactual: an estimate of what sales would have been had the campaign not run, compared with what actually happened.

The cleanest approach is a randomised holdout. A share of the target audience is deliberately withheld from the campaign, and purchases in the exposed and withheld groups are compared.

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