Why Retail Media is Moving Beyond Attribution to Incrementality
Retail media is pushing marketers beyond attribution and platform metrics, as InMarket’s Michael Della Penna and Basis’ Amy Rumpler explain why incrementality and business outcomes are becoming the new standard for measuring advertising impact.
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For most of digital advertising’s history, measurement has revolved around a relatively simple question: What happened after the ad ran? How many people saw it, clicked it or eventually converted?
These questions built an industry around dashboards, attribution models and performance benchmarks, but they also made the easiest things to measure look like the most reliable evidence of effectiveness.
Retail media is now exposing the limits of that approach. 67% of CMOs plan to increase retail media investment in 2026, yet only 53% believe their retail media networks provide adequate measurement and attribution to support reliable incrementality measurement.
As investment grows, marketers are being pushed to ask a harder question: not just what happened, but what actually changed because advertising was present.
When Measurement Became Easier Than Proof
The advertising industry did not arrive at its current measurement model by accident. It followed the path of least resistance.
Clicks were observable. Impressions were countable. View-through rates could be standardised. Over time, these signals became proxies for performance because the infrastructure was built around what could be tracked rather than what ultimately mattered to the business.
Michael Della Penna, Chief Strategy Officer at InMarket, sees that legacy as one of the central reasons marketers still struggle to connect advertising with real-world outcomes.
“The industry has long optimised for clicks, impressions, and view-through rates — metrics that were easy to measure and easy to treat as a proxy for success,” he says. “The infrastructure was built around what was trackable, not what was meaningful.”
The distinction is more important now because retail media has brought marketers closer to actual commerce signals without necessarily solving the question of causality.
The old model can tell marketers:
- Who saw the ad
- Who interacted with it
- Who eventually purchased
- Which channel received the credit
The harder questions are different:
- Who purchased because of the advertising?
- What would have happened without the campaign?
- Did the advertising create incremental demand?
- Did it influence a purchase outside the retailer’s own ecosystem?
That last question is particularly important. Consumers rarely organise their shopping lives around a single retailer, yet many measurement systems still do.
Della Penna argues that the growing availability of location and commerce data is beginning to change the equation. Instead of treating transactions as the end of an attribution chain, marketers can increasingly examine whether advertising generated incremental visits and purchases.
The shift sounds technical. In practice, it changes what marketers are allowed to call success.
Closed-Loop Measurement Still Has a Missing Link
Retail media has promised something traditional advertising struggled to deliver: a closed loop between exposure and purchase.
The proposition is compelling. A retailer knows what was advertised, who was exposed and, potentially, what that consumer bought. The distance between media and commerce appears to disappear.
But there is still a gap between seeing what happened and knowing why it happened.
“We’re closer than ever,” Della Penna says. “Retail media networks have real first-party purchase data, which is a great start — but that doesn’t mean they can automatically measure incrementality, or see purchases that happen outside their own siloed view.”
That distinction cuts directly into one of the industry’s most comfortable assumptions. A purchase following an ad is not necessarily a purchase caused by an ad.
A consumer who was already planning to buy may simply have been counted as a successful conversion. Meanwhile, a consumer influenced by an ad may purchase later, through another retailer, and disappear from the original measurement window.
True closed-loop measurement, therefore, needs more than a transaction log. It needs a counterfactual: what would this consumer have done if the advertising had never happened?
“Most closed-loop measurement today only explains what happened after an ad ran, not what happened because of the ad,” Della Penna says.
That is why incrementality has become such an important dividing line. It asks marketers to separate natural demand from demand that advertising actually created.
The implication is uncomfortable but useful. A measurement system should not simply reward the media closest to the sale. It should help establish whether the media changed the likelihood of the sale happening at all.
That requires broader purchase data, independent measurement and a willingness to look beyond the boundaries of a single retail ecosystem. In other words, the loop is only truly closed when it can account for what happened outside the loop.
The New Measurement Battle is Happening Inside the C-Suite
The pressure to solve this problem is not coming only from marketers.
Retail media has moved measurement closer to the centre of conversations about revenue, margin, customer acquisition and business growth. As a result, the audience for marketing performance has expanded. The CMO is no longer the only executive asking whether a campaign worked.
CFOs and boards want evidence that the investment created something the business would not otherwise have received. That changes the nature of the measurement debate.
Amy Rumpler, EVP of Integrated Client Solutions at Basis, argues that the industry has moved beyond the earlier questions that accompanied social, programmatic and other digital shifts.
“What’s different about the current measurement debate is that we’re no longer asking whether digital advertising or specific digital channels work — we’re now asking how to prove what actually created incremental growth.”
The consequence is a growing tension between the speed of commercial decision-making and the complexity of marketing measurement.
Finance wants immediacy. Commerce wants to understand what is moving sales. Marketing needs to account for the longer journey between exposure and customer value.
Rumpler sees the marketers best positioned for this environment as those who can translate media investment into a language that travels across those functions.
- Revenue: Did the investment contribute to growth?
- Customer acquisition: Did it bring in customers who would not otherwise have converted?
- Margin and commerce: Did the activity support profitable demand rather than simply transactions?
- Lifetime value: Did it create customers worth retaining?
- Incrementality: What changed because the campaign existed?
That requires a measurement strategy that does not belong to any single media platform.
“The best measurement strategies start with business objectives, not platform metrics,” Rumpler says. That may be the most important shift of all. Platform reporting can remain useful, but it becomes evidence rather than a verdict.
“Platform reporting [is] an input—not the final answer,” she adds.
The measurement framework, in other words, has to sit above the platforms. Every channel gets evaluated against the same business questions rather than being allowed to define success on its own terms.
The Future is Less About Who Gets Credit Than What Creates Growth
The next era of retail media may make one of advertising’s oldest arguments less relevant: who gets credit for the sale.
Consumers do not experience advertising in neat channel divisions. A person might see a connected TV ad, encounter a display, visit a retailer and eventually purchase. No single interaction necessarily explains the outcome.
Each may play a different role.
Rumpler said the industry would develop a clearer understanding of “contribution versus attribution”, moving beyond which channel gets credit to how different channels work together to influence outcomes.
That means measurement must move beyond winner-takes-all attribution. Upper-funnel media may create consideration, retail media may capture intent, and search may convert it. The goal is to understand what each interaction contributed.
As Della Penna put it, marketers need to “measure what moves the business, and optimise what drives it”.
Ultimately, retail media measurement is becoming less about proving what happened and more about proving what changed, and whether that change created incremental growth.
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