Beyond ROAS: The New Metrics Defining Retail Media Success

How to measure your progress

Return on ad spend (ROAS) tells a directional, simple narrative.

Unfortunately, that narrative isn’t the whole story.

Instead of relying solely on ROAS, it’s time to embrace new metrics that tell the whole story: how your retail media advertising is impacting your top line and bottom line positively.

How ROAS leaves gaps

ROAS will tell you, from a 10,000-foot view, how well your campaign is performing. In the new world of retail media, the 10,000-foot view is too far away. Because retail media is always on and utilizes multiple channels, ROAS alone doesn’t tell you how different channels work together to drive brand growth. It also carries the risk of over-attributing success to a single channel, often the one generating the most clicks or impressions, depending on how the rules are defined.

New retail media metrics

In today’s “always on” retail media landscape, relying on a single, blanket metric falls short. A retail media campaign isn’t a one-and-done exercise; it’s a dynamic campaign that requires accurate measurement and continuous monitoring. 

Hence, you need more precise tools that measure how the different components of a full-funnel campaign actually work. These include incrementality, leading indicators, share of voice, customer lifetime value, multi-touch attribution, and brand lift.

Incrementality

One of the challenges with ROAS is that it relies on passive sales attribution. That makes it hard to know whether a campaign reached customers who already planned to buy the product or whether the campaign actually drove new sales. 

Incrementality fixes this problem by separating baseline sales (i.e., purchases that would have happened anyway) from marketing-influenced sales. It does this using advanced statistical techniques such as controlled experiments or synthetic control methods.

Today’s retail media provides advertisers with more advanced ways to measure incrementality at scale, clearly demonstrating campaign impact. Retail media networks that leverage membership data are uniquely equipped to deliver cutting-edge, closed-loop incrementality measurement. These capabilities unlock deeper insights, empowering brands to design true north star campaigns that were once beyond reach for most advertisers.

Leading indicators

Leading indicators measure what’s happening now, not what happened last quarter. Modern retail media networks track various leading indicators to help brands assess and optimize their campaigns in the moment to create strong sales pipeline and long-term growth. Here are some examples:

• New brand buyers: How many shoppers bought your brand for the first time as a result of your campaign? 

• New category buyers: How many shoppers bought your category of product for the first time? 

• Repeat buyer: How many shoppers return to purchase your product multiple times? 

While driving incremental sales is important, it’s just as important to maintain a balance of new and repeat buyers to ensure both short-term wins and long-term success. 

Share of voice (SOV)

Share of voice (SOV) measures your presence in the marketplace relative to your competitors. You calculate it by comparing spend in a category or by examining share of impressions and ad placements. Either way, SOV shows how visible you are compared to others in your space. It’s the percentage of total money you’ve spent in your category relative to what other brands are spending. It looks at pure spending power, outside of any consideration of the success of a specific campaign.

SOV is useful for getting the lay of the land in your category before you launch a campaign. If the money you’ve planned to spend is a drop in the bucket compared to your competitors, you might need to recalibrate your expectations about performance. On the other hand, evaluating SOV could show you a prime opportunity to capitalize on an underdeveloped category.

Customer lifetime value (CLTV)

CLTV is a measure of the total amount of revenue a single customer is likely to generate over their entire engagement with your brand. It’s an important metric when looking at the long-term impacts of your campaign. 

CLTV is about measuring more than sales; it’s about the relationship between your brand and your customer. A higher CLTV tells you that your customer is likely to return again and again. A lower CLTV may point to opportunities to strengthen acquisition, retention, or engagement strategies. A lower CLTV could indicate that something is wrong with either your product or your marketing.

Multi-touch attribution (MTA) 

Multi-touch attribution is a measurement practice that assigns fractional credit to each of the touchpoints in your marketing strategy, allowing you to incrementally measure the various stages of the customer’s journey. This will tell you not only where you made a conversion, but also how customers interacted with your campaign throughout your marketing funnel.

Traditional marketing models either give credit to the first point in the journey, or the last, arbitrarily assigning full credit to just one touchpoint. Instead of simply measuring the endpoint, multi-touch measures every point. Multi-touch eliminates bias and allows you to measure the effectiveness of each touchpoint across multiple channels. 

Brand lift

Brand lift gives advertisers a complete view of the funnel by adding upper-funnel metrics such as brand preference, favorability, and purchase intent to conversion-level reporting. This visibility helps brands fine-tune campaigns to support goals like launching new products or strengthening brand positioning.

While retail media has traditionally been known for its bottom-of-funnel performance capabilities, its future lies in expanding top-of-funnel offerings, like brand lift, to capture the full-funnel impact of campaigns. 

Lean into retail media success with Sam’s Club MAP

Omni-Impact™ is a tool Sam’s Club MAP created to help advertisers see what’s really working for their marketing campaigns. It’s a smarter way to measure media effectiveness powered by AI, built on Sam’s Club’s proprietary membership data and designed to elevate the impact of every dollar spent with MAP.

Unlike traditional multi-touch attribution models that rely on fragmented data and probabilistic assumptions, Omni‑Impact uses deterministic data from our closed-loop ecosystem to measure performance with unmatched precision. It measures true incrementality. It goes beyond first- and last-touch attribution and traditional multi-touch attribution models by scientifically quantifying the impact of each MAP touchpoint across the funnel. 

Whether a member engages with Sponsored Products, Display, including Scan & Go™, offsite or email, Omni‑Impact delivers a clear picture of what influenced a purchase. It’s the first solution to offer a 12-month longitudinal view of campaign performance across MAP channels.

To experience Omni-Impact and the full wealth of metrics beyond ROAS, contact us today about the benefits of running a campaign with Sam's Club MAP.