This article was written with the assistance of GPT-3.

The news: Sam’s Club rolled out closed-loop attribution for both online and offline sales via the launch of its Member Access Platform (MAP).

• The platform enables advertisers to connect search and sponsored product ads to in-club purchases, making it one of the first retail media platforms to enable advertisers to see how specific ads drove specific revenues.
• In-club attribution is currently available for all Sam's Club advertisers with live sponsored product campaigns.

What’s notable about MAP: Traditional in-store attribution methods rely on loyalty card purchases or panel data, which do not encompass all consumer purchase behavior.

• That stands in sharp contrast to MAP, which provides real-time transaction data thanks to Sam’s Club’s unique knowledge about its members that enables it to eliminate the need for extrapolation or panel estimates.
• Those data enable advertisers to make more informed decisions about their advertising campaigns, including consumers’ purchase motivations across channels.
• Those insights have reportedly led to an average increase of nearly 30% in overall return on ad spend (ROAS) for Sam's Club MAP advertisers.

Analyst take: Sam’s Club is leveraging its deep understanding of its members to deliver what advertisers have long seen as a holy grail: closed-loop attribution.

• The platform should make advertising far more efficient as it promises to eliminate much of the guesswork that advertisers do to understand which ads drive which consumers to buy.