Creators, affiliates, marketplaces, and transaction data present measurement challenges, prompting coordinated planning, budgeting, and performance assessment
The last time you bought something on an e-commerce marketplace, was it the on-platform ad that closed the deal, or the creator video you had seen days earlier, or the comparison post on a review site, or any combination of these, that had made you trust the recommendation?
The sale is recorded as a platform conversion, but the creator or reviewer who influenced the decision may not be credited at all. Platform attribution may record other measurable interactions, while influence from external content can be difficult to verify.
Some organisations still treat retail media as a separate channel. One team runs ads on marketplaces, while another manages creators, affiliates, and other partners who talk about the brand elsewhere online, including on the brand’s own website.
These teams often have different goals and budgets, and may communicate minimally, even though customers experience all of these touchpoints as part of a single journey. One customer, one sale — but multiple internal teams may each claim some contribution.
Without tracking the full journey, organisations may pay for multiple touchpoints associated with the same purchase, while still remaining uncertain about their relative influence. This disconnect can make it harder to measure what works, optimise spending, and plan for sustainable growth.
Gaps in channel coordination
So far, much of the retail media discussion has focused on how to win inside the marketplace: ad placements, visibility, and driving more sales per dollar spent.
These factors still matter, but as platforms become more crowded, competition grows more expensive. For many brands and sellers, spending more simply to maintain position can start to look less like a strategic advantage and more like a cost of participation.
In response, some organisations are examining the customer journey earlier and incorporating creators, affiliates, and other off-platform content sources to drive sales both to their own direct-to-consumer sites and to retailer platforms where they also sell.
These creators and affiliates increasingly dominate the early stages of the customer journey, influencing product discovery and shaping preferences on social media and review environments long before a shopper arrives on a retail site.
When these channels operate in silos, organisations may pay twice for a single purchase — a commission to a partner and a media fee on the marketplace — while misattributing the sale. Consolidating creator and affiliate activity into a unified planning and measurement approach with retail media budgets can reduce duplicate spend and internal disputes over channel ownership, and provides better visibility across the full funnel.
Assessing cross-channel performance
Retail media offers something many upper-funnel channels do not: closed-loop measurement at the moment of purchase. Because retailers control both ad placement and transaction data, metrics such as incrementality, SKU-level attribution, and point-of-purchase conversion can be tied directly to actual transactions rather than modeled estimates.
When measurement across retail media and partnerships is consolidated, organisations can reduce duplicated investment on the same customer and obtain a fuller view of performance across the customer journey. This type of cross-funnel perspective can support more informed budgeting and help decision-makers understand which touchpoints are genuinely driving sales, rather than relying on channel-level claims.
Balancing integration and measurement
Integrating retail media with broader creator and affiliate activity creates the basis for multi-touch accountability: end-to-end measurement across sales performance, media effectiveness, and brand outcomes. (Note: Integration may create the technical basis for broader measurement, but “accountability” and “end-to-end measurement” imply a level of completeness that may not be achievable.)
Instead of compensating partners based on isolated metrics such as clicks or impressions, organisations can align rewards with demonstrated impact across the funnel, including conversions that occur on retail media networks*.
Some organisations are considering or adopting several approaches:
- They assess partner activity against conversions on retail media networks, alongside upstream metrics such as reach, engagement, and consideration.
- They use partner channels that may be less contested and potentially more cost-effective than bidding against multiple competitors for the same sponsored placement, although the comparison depends on commissions, production costs, platform fees, and campaign objectives.
- They activate partners earlier in the journey with the aim of building awareness and intent before a shopper opens a marketplace app, so retail media may capitalise on that prior exposure at the point of sale.
While some brands in the region may still treat these areas separately, connecting them — through coordinated planning, measurement, and budgeting — may become increasingly important for organisations seeking more efficient and accountable digital spending. This can be pursued through an integrated platform, multiple connected tools, or organisational processes, depending on the organisation’s needs and data environment.
*conversion-based or performance-based compensation is one possible model; it may not suit upper-funnel partners or campaigns where influence is not directly measurable.
