Retail media has become one of the fastest-growing and most influential channels in modern advertising. As retailers transform their digital ecosystems into powerful media platforms, brands now have the ability to reach shoppers right at the moment of intent.
And it’s no surprise that retail media is absorbing a larger share of marketing budgets each year, or that analysts project continued double-digit growth across global markets. Worldwide investment with retail media networks (RMNs) is set to reach $174.9bn this year.
Yet despite this momentum, retail media is still measured predominantly through the same narrow set of performance metrics: ROAS, conversion rate, click-throughs, and product-level sales. These numbers matter. No channel sits closer to the point of purchase, but they only reveal part of the story.
Focusing solely on sales ignores a powerful truth: retail media also shapes how shoppers think, feel, and remember a brand long before they hit “add to cart.”
That’s where retail media brand lift becomes the unsung hero, a metric that captures the full impact of retail media by revealing the brand outcomes it creates behind the scenes.
Why Retail Media Needs Brand Lift, Not Just ROAS
Performance numbers tell you what happened, but brand lift explains why it happened and what could happen next.
Retail media’s influence stretches far beyond last-click attribution. Whether shoppers encounter a sponsored product on page one, a promoted banner in a retailer’s app, or a category takeover on an e-commerce homepage, these touchpoints have a significant impact on:
- Brand awareness
- Brand recall
- Message association
- Consideration and preference
In other words, retail media does more than drive conversion, it builds mental availability at the exact moment shoppers are making decisions.
Ignoring brand lift means undervaluing your investment. A campaign might look “low ROAS” on paper but actually deliver a substantial rise in brand perceptions that fuels future sales, repeat purchases, and loyalty. Without measurement, these effects remain invisible.
What Is Brand Lift in Retail Media?
Brand lift in retail media measures the change in consumer perception after exposure to a retail media campaign. It answers headline questions like:
- Do shoppers now recognise the brand more easily?
- Did the ad improve brand preference?
- Are shoppers more likely to consider the brand on their next visit?
Unlike ROAS, which captures immediate transactional behaviour, brand lift captures incremental shifts in mindset; the invisible progress that drives long-term market share growth.
Retail media is particularly influential here because consumers are usually highly attentive. They’re actively looking for a product and are close to choice-making moments. They’re essentially primed to react to well delivered advertising.
Measuring brand lift helps you to understand how your retail media is shaping the shoppers’ behaviours beyond the sale itself.
Why Brand Lift Is the Unsung Hero of Retail Media
Retail media sits uniquely at the intersection of branding and performance. Both the power of the brand itself, and the strategic placement of relevant products move the needle for retailers. Here’s why:
1. Retail Media Influences the Entire Funnel
Shoppers exposed to retail media ads often show improvements in awareness, recall and message reinforcement before they ever click or buy. This upper-funnel value is rarely recorded in commerce dashboards.
Each retail media channel brings its own strengths to brand building. Online and display formats perform strongly on ad recall and attribution, ensuring clear brand visibility. DOOH drives higher interest, message clarity, and brand familiarity, while CTV excels in boosting ad likeability and brand image. Social ads effectively increase preference and consideration, and display is particularly powerful for triggering specific intent actions such as testing, buying, or recommending a product. Together, these strengths show why a multi-channel retail media mix is essential for full-funnel impact.
2. It Strengthens Future Sales Potential
Brand lift signals a campaign’s contribution to long-term growth. Even if short-term sales are modest, strong lift often correlates with category expansion. 50% of consumers are more likely to buy from a brand they recognise.
3. It Uncovers Hidden Incrementality
Sponsored products, on-site display and off-site extensions all influence perception, sometimes even when consumers don’t click. Brand lift reveals these effects clearly.
4. It Helps You Optimise Retail Media Budgets Wisely
With lift data, brands can compare which retailers, formats, placements or audiences generate the most meaningful impact, not just the most efficient clicks.
5. It Creates a More Balanced View of Success
Retail media isn’t a “performance-only” channel. Brand lift embeds strategic thinking into a space that has long been dominated by ROAS and CPC.
How to Measure Brand Lift in Retail Media
Measuring retail media brand lift requires an approach rooted in real consumer feedback, not platform-level assumptions. The gold standard is an exposed vs control brand lift study, applied specifically to retail environments.
1. Identify the Exposed Group
These are shoppers who have seen the retail media campaign, whether through sponsored listings, banners, on-site media, or off-site programmatic extensions.
2. Build a Matched Control Group
A similar audience that was not exposed to the campaign. This isolates the incremental impact of the retail media activity itself.
3. Ask Both Groups the Same Brand Questions
Typically covering:
- Brand awareness
- Brand recall
- Message association
- Consideration
- Preference
The difference between the two groups reveals the brand lift generated by the campaign.
4. Analyse Results by Placement, Audience, and Format
This helps marketers understand which touchpoints do the most heavy lifting for the brand.
To find out more about brand lift methodologies, read our article that delves deeper into the different ways you can measure lift.
Why Measurement Helps Advertisers Perform
Retail media measurement is notoriously fragmented. Data often sits within retailer walled gardens, performance metrics are not standardised, and off-site campaign impact is difficult to attribute.
Without brand lift measurement, advertisers often rely too heavily on ROAS as the single KPI. And with limited visibility into upper-funnel impact across retailers, this can lead to underestimation of campaigns.
Brand lift provides the missing layer that ties these pieces together. It turns retail media into a strategic channel, not just a performance one.
