Setting up a retail media plan for most brands and agencies has never been easier. There are more retail media networks online than ever before, and major players like Amazon, Walmart, and Instacart continue to rapidly roll out new improvements and features for them. However, simply having more advertising options doesn’t guarantee strong advertising performance.
As Pacvue’s Q4 2024 Retail Media Benchmark Report found, advertisers recorded lower average return on Amazon ad spend year over year. With more competition, it’s crucial for advertisers to start figuring out new ways to turn all those new insights into action.
We caught up with Pacvue’s Director of Product Strategy and Operations, Michael Nunes, who offered four key strategies for getting the most out of retail media networks:
1. Learn to Sail the Sea of Data
Sometimes, it doesn’t even seem like measurement is a problem for retail media—it’s that we’re measuring too many things at once. To drive real top-line growth from retail media networks, Michael suggests looking for partners that can deliver cross-retailer data—and tell you what it all means—as you navigate all the different inputs from your campaigns. This will help you optimize your investments at a deeper level.
“You need a partner who will act as connective tissue between retail media networks and your brand,” he says. “There’s so much data to sift through—some which can even be contradictory or misleading—that brands often need trusted experts to help with it.”
2. Tell Your Data Story
Too many numbers can make it hard to see the story itself. A strategic partner who can aggregate and analyze data from a wide range of sources will be invaluable when you build a cohesive data story with your team, putting the disparate data pieces together to highlight the key advertising takeaways that actually matter to your business.
“A partner that acts as a middle layer between data providers and brands can bridge the language barrier between the volumes of raw and confusing data and meaningful recommendations,” says Nunes.
3. Use Rules-Based Automations to Identify New Opportunities
Advertisers who have been in the retail media space might be familiar with rules-based targeting—especially when it comes to tactics like launching a promotion when your competitors run out of inventory. But what about rules that can help increase your share of voice across a specific retailer? Do you know where your products stand in the market relative to your competition?
With a vendor specializing in strategic share-of-voice data across retailers, advertisers can tap into new layers of data and automations that allow them to achieve complex, hard-to-measure business goals that depend on multiple variables and channels.
4. Forget Omnichannel—It’s All About Omni-Retail
Is your campaign performing better on Amazon or Walmart? How about your product pages and your reviews? What is your activity like on Kroger and TikTok Shop?
In the fast-paced world of retail media, early adopters of new channels and advertisers experimenting with new tactics can strike gold. But, if you can’t compare your performance across multiple retailers, you won’t have the data necessary for truly meaningful insights.
With a strategic partner, you can tap into a high-level dashboard view of business health and highlight the specific metrics that are most important for your campaign goals. By looking into cross-retailer insights, you can expand into new retailers and outmaneuver the competition.
Winning in the New Commerce Landscape
There’s no doubt that retail media budgets—and retail media networks—have become mature in 2025. Advertisers are projected to spend record-setting amounts on retail media this year, with eMarketer estimating retail media ad spend to reach $62 billion.
More spend means more competition, so brands and agencies have to be more precise about ad placements, share of voice, and full funnel media strategies. This starts with building out not just the right media plan, but the right partnerships.
Want to know how Amazon, Walmart, and Instart’s retail media networks performed last quarter and what we think will happen this year? Download Pacvue’s Q4 2024 Retail Media Benchmark Report here.
