Measuring retail media network success: 24 metrics that matter

Large retail brands are often sitting on a treasure trove of first-party data that could have immense value to other brands — but only if you can turn it into audiences for effective ad targeting. That's where a retail media network (RMN) comes in. 

Providing businesses with a way to place ads on properties you own, like within your stores and on your website, is a good way to boost revenue. But retail advertising placements are just part of the value. Where you can really sweeten the deal is by responsibly providing advertisers a way to create audiences based on your customer data. All the first-party data you've collected over the years about your customers' demographics, preferences, and buying habits can become a tool for more effective ad campaigns. 

For brands offering an RMN, when your advertisers win, so do you. At least, that's true as long as you can measure the win.

8 valuable RMN metrics to track

Famously, retail margins on the items you sell are slim. That puts a frustrating limit on how much profit you can make from unit sales alone. 

The potential revenue you can make from monetizing your first-party data with a retail media network can be a lucrative supplement to your current profits. 

But building out an RMN requires some upstart costs, so you want to track the right metrics to make sure it pays off. Some RMN metrics to keep an eye on include:

1. Total revenue - The most important metric is how much money your RMN brings in for the company.

2. Time to market - How long it takes you to get your RMN set up and available to

3. Number of brands onboarded - The number of advertisers that are set up on the platform, prepping or launching retail media campaigns.

4. Number of audiences viewed - A usage metric that tells you how much advertisers are using the platform to create or browse audiences.

5. Number of audiences total - The number of unique audiences that you and advertisers have created from your data.

6. Speed of creating audiences - How long it takes to create an audience.

7. Cange is sales - The difference in your sales numbers before and after launching your RMN.

8. Revenue distribution across advertisers - How well spread out the investment in your RMN is across customers. You don't want too many of your eggs in one basket.

16 metrics to offer advertisers using your RMN

If you want your retail media network to be — and stay — successful, the businesses that advertise with you need a way to know that their investment is paying off. More than that, they'll want access to metrics that will help them break down their retail advertising campaign performance so they can look for ways to improve.

To enhance the value of your RMN and keep advertisers coming back, aim to provide the following metrics:

1. Ad impressions or views - How many views their ads receive across different channels.

2. Share of shelf/share of voice - How often a brand's products appear in search results, category pages, and in the store vs. their competitors.

3. CTR (click-through rate) - The number of clicks online ads get, in comparison to how often they're viewed.

4. CPC (cost per click) - How much the advertiser spent for each click their ads received.

5. Cart adds - The number of times their products were added to an online shopping cart.

6. Conversion rates - The number of times an ad contributed to a sale.

7. Online sales - The number of sales the brand makes online while running their campaigns.

8. In-store sales - The number of the brand's products that are purchased inside your stores while their campaigns are running.

9. Basket size/ticket size - The total order size for purchases of the brand's products, so you can capture when customers buy several of their products at once.

10. Number of new customers - How many first-time buyers of the brand the ad campaigns helped convert.

11. Customer acquisition costs - How much the brand spent on average for each new customer.

12. CLV (customer lifetime value) - The estimated value of each new customer based on what they're expected to spend over time.

13. Total sales from RMN properties - The total number of sales achieved across different channels (online and in-store) during their ad campaigns, both in terms of units sold and the total dollar amount.

14. Sales lift - The difference in sales from the audiences exposed to your ad campaign and a control group that wasn’t.

15. Total revenue - The total amount the brand has made in sales during the campaign.

16. ROAS (return on ad spend) - How the total revenue compares to how much they spent on ads.

If you can provide advertisers metrics that demonstrate how much value their ads are delivering, you'll make a persuasive case for them to continue advertising with you.

The best way to produce the right metrics: Build your RMN on a composable architecture

Measuring the performance of your RMN (and the ads on it) is important. But these metrics won't matter much if your RMN isn't successful --- and the key to that success is building it on composable architecture. Choosing a composable solution brings a number of valuable benefits:

Fast time-to-value

By using your own data cloud as a foundation, a composable solution lets you get up-and-running fast. A short time-to-market means you start seeing value much sooner than with alternatives that require a slow start-up process.

Single, accessible source for first-party data

A composable layer on top of your data cloud lets you create an accessible single source of truth for your first-party customer data that you can trust to be accurate. You no longer have to rely on data analysts to pull reports from multiple places to gain a hodgepodge picture of your data. 

Offer self-serve audience building

You can go one step further and create an audience builder that makes self-serve audience building simple. You won't need to lean on your experienced data analysts to parse the data. You can create custom audiences on your own, regardless of your skill level — making it much faster and easier to help advertisers start launching campaigns that get results.

Provide advertisers with additional self-service options

Forward-thinking retailers can potentially build a platform that lets advertisers deploy campaigns and view metrics in the same place they access audiences. Even better, AI agents can make suggestions for the best-performing channels and product recommendations for different audience sections. The more advertisers can do on their own, the less hand-holding your team needs to do, freeing you to focus on more value-driven activities. The technology is there, but not many RMNs offer this yet. Employing tech that enables this will put your RMN on the cutting edge. 

Connects to your main advertising channels

You can skip all the extra work of moving data from one platform into another. A good composable solution, like a composable CDP or Compound Marketing Engine, will integrate naturally with top advertising channels like Meta, TikTok, and Google, so advertisers can use it to power multichannel campaigns and view metrics for all of them in one place.

Real-time performance metrics

Monitor campaign performance in real time in the same platform where you create audiences and run campaigns. You can give advertisers the information they need to refine ads and strategy as needed to improve results faster.

Maintains data security

Even though an RMN platform makes your data more accessible to employees at all skill levels, it still keeps your private information safe. And by building on your data warehouse, your data stays in your secure cloud, reducing data governance and compliance risks.

Drive significant ROI

With fast setup, powerful targeting options, and real-time access to performance data to refine your campaigns, a composable solution gives you the means to empower advertisers to achieve compound growth. That will keep them coming back, ensuring your profits increase as well. 

Turn your data into profit

Building an RMN alone will likely do wonders for your bottom line, but using your data cloud and a composable solution to do so can lead to even greater results. Polish e-commerce giant, Allegro, used GrowthLoop to create an RMN that made their audience data accessible and also made it possible to provide AI-driven insights to advertisers. The results were undeniable: they saw a 2x increase in ROAS.

To tap into that power for yourself, book apersonalized demo to see how the GrowthLoop Compound Marketing Engine for Media Networks can work for you.