How Mature Is Your Retail Media Strategy?

Moving Beyond Basic Marketplace Search

Retail media has moved from a tactical add-on to a genuine strategic priority in a relatively short period of time. The problem is that the conversation about retail media maturity—what good actually looks like, and how to honestly assess where you are—hasn’t kept pace with that shift.

Most brands know they should be doing more with retail media. Fewer have a clear framework for diagnosing what’s holding them back.

What is a holistic retail media strategy?

Retail media isn’t one thing. It encompasses on-site search, display, sponsored formats, off-site and programmatic activity, in-store digital, and an expanding range of audience and measurement products that vary significantly by retailer. A brand that has mastered Amazon Sponsored Products but has never touched DSP is not “doing retail media” in any comprehensive sense—but they might believe they are.

The maturity problem is that brands often conflate activity with capability. Running ads is not the same as having a comprehensive retail media strategy. The distinction only becomes clear when you start asking the harder questions about measurement, structure, and what decisions the data is actually driving.

How do you measure retail media incrementality?

At entry level, brands measure retail media through platform-reported ROAS. That’s a reasonable starting point, but it has well-documented limitations—particularly around overlap between ad types and the impact of upper-funnel activity on conversion.

More mature approaches introduce incrementality testing: holdouts, matched market tests, and campaign-off analyses that reveal what retail media is actually driving rather than what it’s claiming credit for. The most sophisticated approaches integrate retail media measurement with wider marketing mix modelling to understand its contribution alongside other channels. If your retail media decisions are driven primarily by in-platform ROAS, you’re in the earlier stages.

What is the ideal channel split for a mature retail media funnel?

A lot of brands concentrate almost entirely on sponsored search—the most immediate, most measurable retail media format. That’s not wrong, but it’s incomplete. Search captures existing demand. It doesn’t create it.

A maturing retail media strategy progressively integrates upper-funnel and off-site capability: DSP, display retargeting, streaming audio and video, and audience-led campaigns that build the pool of shoppers flowing into search. Without this, brands become increasingly reliant on defending existing demand rather than generating new shoppers. If your retail media investment is more than 80% concentrated in sponsored search with no programmatic or upper-funnel activity, there’s a maturity gap worth addressing.

How should a business structure its performance marketing teams?

Retail media is often managed by performance marketing teams who are equipped for search but less familiar with audience strategy, programmatic buying, and the more complex attribution models upper-funnel activity requires. That’s a skills gap, not a moral failing—but it does create a ceiling.

Mature retail media organisations have either built internal capability across the full funnel or have established a partnership with an external performance marketing agency that provides it. They also have governance structures that prevent siloed decision-making—where separate teams manage separate formats without a shared view of combined investment and impact. Working alongside a full service amazon agency ensures these cross-format budgets are managed cohesively under one roof.

Discover how our cross-channel marketing frameworks maximize ROI across Google and Amazon by reading about our Performance Marketing Capabilities.

What is the role of custom audiences and first-party data in retail media?

The most advanced retail media programmes use first-party and retailer data to move beyond broad targeting. They’re building custom audiences based on purchase history, loyalty data, and CRM signals, and connecting that to retail media activation in a way that improves both relevance and efficiency. This is where clean room environments like AMC become important—providing the analytical layer that makes audience strategy actionable rather than theoretical.

Overcoming the search optimisation plateau

The most common maturity trap is optimising within a constrained frame—getting very good at sponsored search while leaving the broader system underdeveloped. It creates a situation where efficiency metrics look healthy but growth plateaus, because you’ve optimised for capturing existing demand without investing in creating new demand.

Moving beyond this trap requires looking at the brand’s complete commerce presence. Partnering with a comprehensive commerce agency allows brands to harmonize their marketplace presence with broader digital channels. Retail media maturity is not about doing more; it’s about executing across the full system with the measurement rigour to know what’s actually working.