Introduction
Retail media has moved from a promising innovation to one of the fastest-growing and most strategically critical advertising channels. As retailers like Amazon, Walmart, Carrefour, and Tesco transform their digital ecosystems into powerful media networks, brands are shifting increasing budget toward formats that blend commerce, data, and consumer proximity.
But with rapid growth comes complexity: fragmented measurement standards, inconsistent KPIs, and varied capabilities across networks. In 2026, retail media analytics has become essential for advertisers who need more than impressions and sales—they want unified measurement, credible benchmarks, and a clear understanding of how retail media contributes to brand equity, not just transactions.
This article outlines the key retail media benchmarks, measurement frameworks, and KPIs shaping 2026, along with a forward-looking view of how brands can navigate the next era of retail media effectiveness.
What Is Retail Media Analytics?
Retail media analytics refers to the measurement, analysis, and optimization of advertising delivered on retailer-owned platforms and networks. This includes on-site placements (sponsored products, display ads, shoppable videos), off-site activations powered by retailer data (programmatic audiences, social integrations), and in-store media such as digital screens or point-of-sale displays.
What makes retail media unique is the consolidation of three critical elements within a single ecosystem:
- Media – The ad placements reaching shoppers during high-intent moments.
- Commerce – Direct access to transaction and product-level conversion data.
- First-party shopper data – Audience insights grounded in real purchasing behaviour, not third-party cookies or probabilistic identifiers.
Unlike traditional digital media, retail media analytics goes beyond ad performance to tie exposure directly to shopping impact. At the same time, it extends beyond lower-funnel metrics: 2025’s most mature advertisers evaluate not only sales but brand awareness, consideration, and incremental impact—metrics that help explain why campaigns succeed, not just how much they sold.
Why Benchmarks Matter in Retail Media
As retail media matures, advertisers increasingly rely on retail media benchmarks to evaluate investment. Benchmarks help marketers compare performance across networks with very different formats and data structures, set realistic expectations, justify budget allocation by demonstrating efficiency versus other channels and identify optimization opportunities, such as high-performing SKUs or creative formats.
Yet the industry lacks standardization. Each retailer offers its own reporting suite, definitions, and KPIs, making cross-channel comparison difficult. This fragmentation means advertisers often operate without a clear baseline.
In 2026, brands are demanding:
- Unified metrics and independent verification
- Comparable benchmarks across retailers and categories
- Visibility into both short-term sales and long-term brand impact
Retail media analytics is evolving quickly to meet this need, backed by a growing expectation for transparency and neutral measurement partners who are not monetised by media spend.
Core KPIs for Retail Media Measurement
Retail media performance can be organized into four major KPI categories. The brands leading in 2026 are those balancing them cohesively rather than optimizing only for ROAS.
1. Sales and Conversion Metrics
These KPIs remain foundational — but they no longer tell the full story.
- ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) – Still the most common metric.
- Cost per sale / cost per incremental unit sold
- Conversion rate
- Basket size and cross-sell impact
- Share of category (on retailer platform)
While conversion data is powerful, it is increasingly contextualized with incrementality testing to distinguish causal impact from baseline demand.
2. Audience Engagement Metrics
Beyond sales, engagement KPIs help advertisers understand how well their ads drive attention and interaction.
- Impressions
- Click-through rate (CTR)
- Viewability
- Dwell time on product pages
- Add-to-cart rate
In 2026, attention metrics—how long a user actively engages with a placement—are gaining ground as retailers integrate eye-tracking models and real-world behavioral data.
3. Brand Metrics
This is where the industry is evolving fastest. Retail media is no longer seen only as a performance channel; it’s becoming a brand impact channel.
Key brand KPIs include: Brand awareness lift, Brand favorability lift, Consideration lift, Purchase intent
Brands increasingly run brand lift studies to measure how exposure within retail networks influences perception, even when immediate sales remain modest.
Retail media delivering deeper brand value: campaigns generate a +2-point lift in specific brand image compared to the average of all other media strategies and a +4-point increase in specific purchase intent. These gains show that retail media is no longer just a conversion engine — it actively shapes brand perception and future demand. To capture this added value, advertisers must integrate KPIs such as brand awareness, brand image, and intent into their measurement frameworks, ensuring they recognise the full extent of retail media’s impact.
4. Incrementality and Attribution Metrics
These KPIs reveal what would (or would not) have happened without the campaign:
- Incremental sales
- Incremental reach
- Audience overlap between retail networks
- Multi-touch attribution (MTA) models
- Geo-based or cohort-based lift testing
2026 marks a shift toward independent incrementality measurement — brands want results validated by partners who do not operate the retail media inventory.
Retail Media Benchmarks for 2026
While benchmarks vary by category, retailer, and market, here are the dominant trends shaping retail media measurement in 2026.
1. ROI and ROAS Expectations Become More Nuanced
ROAS is no longer the universal indicator of retail media success. Many advertisers now separate:
- Immediate ROAS (sales during campaign)
- Delayed ROAS (sales uplift 2–6 weeks later)
- Incremental ROAS (net additional value created)
Categories with lower purchase frequency (beauty, home care) increasingly rely on brand lift benchmarks instead of purely transactional ones.
2. CPMs Continue to Rise — but Value Justification Improves
Retail media CPMs have increased year over year due to higher advertiser demand, richer first-party data and new immersive formats (video, sponsored content).
In 2026, advertisers expect higher CPMs to be paired with better shopper insights, improved targeting precision, and more transparent performance metrics.
3. Off-Site Retail Media Surges
Retailers are expanding off-site activations using their shopper data on programmatic display, Connected TV (CTV), Social platforms and Retail search on third-party apps.
This creates cross-channel measurement challenges—but also opportunities to evaluate full-funnel impact, especially for awareness and consideration.
4. Attention Metrics Move Into the Mainstream
Advertisers increasingly benchmark average dwell time, interaction rate, scroll depth, eye-visible exposure duration. Attention is increasingly recognized as a strong indicator of future outcomes, particularly when it comes to brand lift. When running a brand lift study, it becomes essential to evaluate several layers of brand recognition: how well consumers attribute the ad to the correct brand, how effectively the targeting drives genuine interest, and—most importantly—whether people actually remember the ad. Ad recall is a decisive signal, as it reveals whether the creative elements were distinctive and impactful enough to stand out in a crowded retail media environment.
5. Brand Lift Becomes an Expected KPI
Retail media is maturing into a true full-funnel channel. As a result, brand lift studies are no longer “nice to have”—they are a requirement for evaluating:
- Creative effectiveness
- Ad recall
- Attribution to the brand
- Ad placement quality
- Consumer perception change
- Category disruption potential
Retailers are responding by making it easier to integrate third-party survey-based research providers.
Recent performance data reinforces just how important it has become for advertisers to look beyond pure sales metrics and integrate brand-focused KPIs into their retail media analytics.
Compared with 2024, retail media campaigns in 2025–2026 are significantly better targeted, driving stronger consumer impact across the full funnel. Ad recall is up +3 points, demonstrating improved visibility and memorability of placements. Attribution clarity has risen by +6 points, reflecting a more accurate understanding of how retail media contributes to overall brand performance.
6. Demand for Independent Measurement Rises
With retailers owning both the inventory and the data, advertisers seek:
- Neutral, non-monetised measurement
- Cross-retailer visibility
- Standardized metrics that can be compared fairly
This shift is one of the most important dynamics shaping 2026’s retail media analytics ecosystem.
How to Build a Retail Media Analytics Framework
To evaluate retail media holistically, advertisers in 2026 use a balanced framework that combines performance, brand, and incrementality.
1. Define Objectives Across All Stages of the Funnel
Retail media can generate: Awareness, a better Brand Perception, Consideration, Conversion, Loyalty.
Each stage requires dedicated KPIs and benchmarks.
2. Combine Short-Term Sales With Long-Term Brand Metrics
Relying solely on ROAS leads to underinvestment in brand-driving formats such as video. A modern framework integrates:
- Conversion KPIs → to understand immediate sales impact
- Brand lift KPIs → to understand perception shifts
- Attention KPIs → to assess creative quality and engagement
This creates a comprehensive view of advertising effectiveness.
3. Standardize KPIs Across Retail Networks
Even if retailers report differently, advertisers can develop internal consistency by aligning definitions for impressions, new-to-brand sales, incremental units, awareness lift.
This enables fairer cross-network comparisons.
4. Adopt an Always-On Measurement Layer
2026 leaders embed measurement across every campaign, ensuring continuity in Brand Performance and Lift, shopper behaviour monitoring , share-of-search and share-of-category analytics, creative performance insights.
This turns retail media into a predictable, optimizable channel — not a black box.
How Happydemics Measures Retail Media Performance
In a landscape where retailers control data access and standards vary widely, advertisers increasingly turn to neutral measurement partners for unbiased insights.
Happydemics provides a transparent, survey-based measurement approach designed specifically for cross-retail comparability. Key advantages include:
1. Independent, Non-Monetized Measurement
Happydemics does not monetize media, ensuring neutrality in:
- Brand lift studies
- Awareness and consideration KPIs
- Creative effectiveness analysis
- Cross-retailer benchmarks
Advertisers receive insights without platform bias.
2. Consumer-Based Brand Metrics
Instead of relying solely on retailer-side data, Happydemics measures:
- Real consumer awareness
- Perceived brand quality
- Consideration likelihood
- Purchase intent
- Ad recall across retailer environments
This provides a more complete view of advertising effectiveness in retail media.
3. Cross-Retail Media Visibility
Because retailers report differently, Happydemics offers a unified methodology that works across Amazon, Walmart, Carrefour, Ocado, Target, Retail media networks across Europe, the U.S., APAC, and LATAM.
Advertisers can finally benchmark performance across markets and networks using consistent KPIs.
4. Full-Funnel Measurement
This includes:
- Brand lift
- Attention KPIs (Attribution, Ad recall and Interest)
- Creative diagnosis
- Self-reported purchase behaviour
- Brand perception shifts
By connecting these brand insights with retailer performance KPIs, Happydemics helps advertisers understand the true value of their retail media investment — not just the transactional outcomes.
Conclusion
As retail media enters a new phase of maturity, robust retail media analytics and clear benchmarks are critical for navigating a fragmented and rapidly evolving ecosystem. In 2026, advertisers need frameworks that balance:
- Sales performance
- Brand impact
- Attention quality
- Incremental value
- Cross-retailer comparability
Brands that master these dimensions will not only measure better—they will plan smarter, invest more efficiently, and unlock the full potential of retail media as a growth engine.
