“As retail media has grown, the landscape has become increasingly complex and fragmented, said EMARKETER principal analyst Sky Canaves during last week’s EMARKETER's summit on Commerce Media Trends 2025. “Comparisons are hard when standards vary across channels and platforms.”

More than half (55%) of marketers see the lack of standardization as their biggest retail media related challenge, according to a January 2024 Association of National Advertisers survey.

• Marketers are prioritizing measurement across channels this year, with 71% identifying advancements in analytics, attribution, and measurement models as their greatest opportunity in 2025, according to an October 2024 NCSolutions study.

As marketers invest more in retail media, they’re looking for standardized measurement to improve their performance.

“More open and honest conversations with our media network partners about media methodologies, attribution, and what brands and SKUs get credit for is how we make progress in this space,” said Pepsico vice president of commerce media Mike Glaser at the summit.

Here’s how networks and marketers are finding clearer and more actionable data.

Advancing clean room architecture

Instead of reserving data clean rooms for high-budget campaigns or case studies, they are becoming more of a commerce media expectation, said Christine Grammier, vice president of global measurement products at LiveRamp.

“These processes are becoming more standardized and more regular,” said Grammier, who stressed that these clean rooms can test metrics like incrementality and lifetime value in a neutral space. “They’re really starting 365 days a year.”

While Pepsico uses its own internal standardization models, a neutral third space could allow for a more accurate understanding of the data, said Glaser.

“We build our own media mix modeling (MMM) models in house, but we also know our retail media partners are building their own in-house measurement solutions,” said Glaser. “To a degree, each of us is grading our own homework.”

When actioning data from commerce media partners, simplicity is key, said Michael Campi, senior vice president of marketing at dog food brand Maev.

• “Sometimes retail media networks make it kind of complicated to pull data out in a way to manipulate,” he said.

Tailoring to advanced data needs

Another emerging trend in the retail media space is retailers sharing their overarching sales data, like their spend on Meta or programmatic spend, to give brands a greater understanding of their full-funnel performance, said Grammier.

“I’m excited about this concept of retailers sharing their own conversion data,” said Grammier. “(Marketers) can understand how that upper-funnel brand spend, along with the retail media network brand spend, then drive sales for that brand in that retailer.”

Some 29% of marketers said the ability to measure upper-funnel impact would increase their company’s investment in retail media, per a July 2024 Quartile survey. For small brands like Maev, strictly approaching retail media from a sales perspective isn’t always the right approach, said Campi—especially when so many competitors on platforms like Amazon and Chewy are competing for the same keywords.

“When we’re trying to build awareness for the brand, the right metric is probably not the cost-per-subscriber on Chewy,” he said. “We’re looking a lot more at the cost-per-click metrics and engagement metrics around the ads.”

Retail media beyond Amazon

Amazon holds the bulk of US retail media spending, and brands are recognizing new opportunities while acknowledging this network as the blueprint.

“Amazon is setting the pace for the industry, which is important to watch and understand,” said Glaser. “We often look to Amazon and our strategies on Amazon to say, ‘Where do we anticipate parts of the retail media industry to go, and how can we prepare for that?’”

The growth of retail and commerce media, which has expanded from retail giants like Amazon to financial services and fitness brands, is ultimately a win for responsible data sharing, said Grammier.

“We all kind of shuddered at the thought of cookies going away and privacy really impacting our industry in a negative way, but I think it’s created a brighter day of better data for all of us, and more transparency across the board,” she said.

This was originally featured in the EMARKETER Daily newsletter. For more marketing insights, statistics, and trends, subscribe here.