Commerce intelligence has unlocked a new era of growth in retail media. Forward-thinking brands are moving beyond siloed dashboards and fragmented reports, taking retail data to the next level with real-time analytics platforms that enable smarter budget allocation and unified cross-channel measurement. If you’re still optimizing each retail media platform in isolation, the cost is steep: wasted spend, missed opportunities, and competitors gaining the edge with more sophisticated digital media measurement. This article will show you how leaders are moving from data chaos to clarity, and how you can do the same.
The Data Chaos Problem in Retail Media
Today, we manage our retail media campaigns across dozens of “walled-garden” platforms such as Amazon, Walmart, Target, Instacart, and many more. Each provides its own siloed dashboard, with different metrics, attribution models, and reporting formats.
The result? Data chaos. Marketing teams are wasting valuable hours stitching together spreadsheets just to get a partial view of performance. Blind spots in measurement make it difficult to compare results across retailers. This fragmented data landscape leads to inefficient budget allocation, wasted ad dollars, and opportunities lost to savvier competitors who have more sophisticated commerce data.
What is Commerce Intelligence?
Commerce Intelligence is the evolution of retail media analytics. It goes beyond traditional advertising analytics to unify ads, commerce, and shopper signals into a single source of truth. By connecting media performance with retail operations and real-time shopper behavior, commerce intelligence enables you to create retail-aware automations that directly tie pricing, promotions, and inventory to your advertising decisions. This new level of Commerce Intelligence includes:
- Cross-retailer data consolidation: Giving you one view across retail media networks, including Amazon, Walmart, Target, Instacart, and more.
- Incrementality measurement (iROAS): Allowing you to distinguish between true, incremental sales and the sales you would have made anyway, without advertising investment.
- Real-time retail signals: Creating campaigns that dynamically adjust to your product’s Buy Box status, inventory levels, pricing shifts, promotions, and general shelf health.
- Unified decision-making: Ensuring your marketing, sales, and operations teams align on the same data set, eliminating silos.
How Commerce Intelligence Differs from Traditional Marketing Analytics
Traditional marketing analytics measure clicks, impressions, and conversions in isolation. Commerce intelligence connects the entire commerce cycle:
Ad activity → keyword demand → product availability → pricing & promotions → true sales lift.
This holistic approach empowers you to:
- Adjust bids automatically when stock runs low or shelf performance dips.
- Monitor pricing and Buy Box dynamics in real-time to avoid wasted spend.
- Tie every media dollar directly to retail outcomes like margin, revenue recovery, and profitability.
Commerce intelligence doesn’t just tell you what happened. It tells you why it happened, and what to do next.
The Advantages Brands Gain Using Commerce Intelligence
Commerce intelligence lets you operationalize commerce data in three critical ways:
- Compare performance across all retailers in one consolidated view with unified dashboards and cross-channel measurement.
- Move beyond vanity metrics to uncover true ROI by measuring incrementality (iROAS).
- Respond instantly to retail signals and optimize in the moment by gaining insights from real-time commerce data.
Pacvue’s Edge in Commerce Intelligence
Pacvue was built to break down data silos and centralize data sources in a single command center. Unlike generic advertising analytics tools, Pacvue integrates retail-aware data directly into its real-time analytics platform, making insights both actionable and scalable.
With Pacvue, whether you’re a brand marketer or advertising agency, you can:
- Use the iROAS console to measure true incremental ROI, not just attributed revenue, to gain a more accurate view of your ad campaign’s true impact.
- Access cross-retailer dashboards that consolidate fragmented data into one view.
- Tap into Share of Voice tracking and retail-aware automations to win your category.
Real-world impact: An over-the-counter (OTC) consumer goods brand used Pacvue’s retail-aware automations to achieve a 26% lift in Share of Voice and a 42% increase in Share of Shelf on Amazon. This visibility surge translated directly into higher sales and stronger category dominance. It proves how commerce intelligence doesn’t just optimize ads, it shifts competitive positioning on the digital shelf.
Turning Retail Media Analytics into Action
Commerce Intelligence is only valuable if it provokes action. Pacvue not only identifies more opportunities with streamlined and advanced analytics, but it also turns those insights into automated workflows, making manual campaign optimization a thing of the past.
Pacvue helps you improve efficiency, scale fast, and accelerate growth in several ways:
- Automate real-time budget pacing and dayparting to capture demand when it’s highest.
- Optimize campaigns with Buy Box and inventory-aware rules that protect margins.
- Integrate sales reporting, profitability analysis, and supply chain forecasting for end-to-end visibility.
- Trigger alerts that automatically launch optimizations, removing manual inefficiencies.
Real-World Impact:
Haier used Pacvue’s automated deduction management to recover €800,000 in lost revenue, protecting margins that would otherwise have disappeared due to inefficiencies. By eliminating manual dispute processes, Haier not only safeguarded profitability but also freed teams to focus on growth-driving activities. This demonstrates how automation directly translates into measurable financial outcomes.
New Best Practices in Commerce Media Measurement
As leading brands get to grips with the power of Commerce Intelligence, they’re rethinking how they measure retail media. New best practices are emerging:
- Moving beyond last-click attribution. Last-touch often overstates the performance of your ad campaigns. Incrementality (iROAS) will uncover the true drivers of growth.
- As retailers continue to make their media networks more sophisticated, unifying and simplifying cross-channel measurement is crucial for making relevant performance comparisons.
- Aligning KPIs across sales, marketing, and finance. A single set of performance benchmarks ensures each team is working with the same information and aiming for the same outcome.
Connecting finance and supply chain stakeholders to the same source of truth. With Pacvue’s iROAS and incrementality measurement, finance leaders can validate margin impact while supply chain teams anticipate demand and inventory needs.
Measuring Incrementality and iROAS
Too often, reported “revenue” is simply reattributed spend rather than incremental growth. Last-touch attribution misses the bigger picture: what sales wouldn’t have happened without the ad.
Pacvue’s incrementality console helps you distinguish between incremental sales and attributed sales so you can:
- Justify budgets with confidence.
- Allocate spend toward campaigns that truly drive new revenue.
- Empower finance leaders with a clear view of margin impact, giving confidence in budget decisions.
Learn more about ways that incrementality drives better retail media performance.
The Road Ahead: Intelligence as a Growth Engine
The retail media landscape is only getting more complex, but commerce intelligence is the engine that will help brands thrive.
The Analytics as a Service (AaaS) market was valued at USD 13.3 billion in 2024, and is expected to grow to USD 39.8 billion by 2029, implying a CAGR of ~24.5 % over that period. The anticipated growth, largely fueled by advancements in AI and machine learning, reflects a growing appetite for next-level intelligence that helps businesses make better decisions and act on them faster.
For manufacturers, AI-powered predictive analytics is reshaping retail demand forecasting and inventory planning. Pacvue’s predictive modules use real-time sales data and historical data to project which SKUs to restock and when, integrating ad performance and supply constraints.
Pacvue’s commerce operating system blurs the line between media, operations, and insights (e.g., linking advertising data with inventory, digital shelf metrics, share of voice, etc.). These unified capabilities power sustainable, analytics-driven growth.
Future-ready brands are already shifting from descriptive analytics (“what happened?”) to predictive and prescriptive insights (“what will happen, and what should we do?”).
The Pacvue Advantage
Pacvue is the trusted partner for brands navigating the complexity of retail data, helping them move from fragmented reporting to actionable commerce intelligence. Leading brands don’t just collect data; they operationalize it with Pacvue, transforming raw signals into automated workflows that fuel profitable growth.
With Pacvue, clients gain:
A Single Source of Truth Across Retail Media and Commerce
Pacvue Commerce consolidates data from 100+ global retailers into one unified platform. From campaign performance to inventory, Buy Box, and pricing signals, teams gain real-time visibility and automated insights that connect media investment directly to business outcomes.
Proven Client-Growth Outcomes
Brands across industries have scaled faster with Pacvue.
Real-World Impact:
Instant Pot realized a +260% sales increase, +54% ROAS lift, and +102% Share of Voice after bringing its retail media operations in-house with Pacvue—turning siloed data into sustained growth.
First-to-Market Innovation in Analytics and Automation
Pacvue pioneered retail-aware automation that ties real-time shelf signals (inventory, pricing, promotions) directly to ad optimization. Its predictive analytics and iROAS measurement help brands not only understand past performance but also forecast demand and justify spend with confidence.
Real-World Impact:
Duracell boosted profitability and increased ordered revenue by 30% using Pacvue’s rules-based automations. By optimizing ad spend, protecting margins, and managing catalog priorities, Duracell, with Pacvue, proved how innovation in analytics and automation translates directly into bottom-line results.
Unlocking Growth with Commerce Intelligence
The future of retail media belongs to brands that act on intelligence, not instinct. Commerce intelligence turns fragmented data into connected insights that drive real action and measurable growth. It provides the clarity you need to measure performance, justify spend, and base your advertising investment on real growth opportunities. With Pacvue, you can:
- Consolidate data from 100+ retail networks into one view.
- Automate reporting and cross-retailer dashboards.
- Measure incrementality and iROAS for true ROI.
- Turn real-time signals into automated, profit-driving actions.
If you’d like one-to-one advice on how to turn retail data into growth, book a demo with a Pacvue expert. Discover first-hand how retail media analytics can reveal your true iROAS and give a clear path to smarter, more profitable decisions.
