More Retail Media Networks, More Complexity and It’s Compounding
11 September 2026
Robert McGovern – Director of Paid Advertising
Retail media’s next phase of growth isn’t happening on Amazon. Brands are now managing an average of six retail media networks, a number some forecasts expect to nearly double by the end of the year, drawn from dozens of platforms, each with its own reach, customer profiles and category specialisations, its own login, its own reporting schema, and its own definition of a sale. Unlike search or social, where one or two platforms set the standard, retail media has no Google. It has dozens.
That fragmentation is the easy story to tell. The harder, more important one is what happens underneath it: these platforms don’t just report differently, they behave differently. A grocery retailer’s media reaches a shopper mid-basket-build; a fashion marketplace’s reaches someone mid-browse with no purchase intent yet. The same £10,000 spent on two networks buys different customers, different margins, and different validity at different points in the path to purchase. And, to further add to the complexity, these platforms increasingly influence each other, with exposure on one network shifting behaviour on another in ways neither retailer’s dashboard will ever show you.
Aligning metrics across networks is also not a full solution. You can standardise on ROAS or new-to-brand sales across every platform you run, and still be comparing fundamentally different things, two networks reporting the identical ROAS figure can represent completely different levels of incrementality, reach genuinely different audiences, and carry different margin implications for the retailer sitting behind the inventory. Industry-wide, this is now the top measurement complaint in the category: research from Skai and Stratably found incrementality is the single biggest challenge advertisers face, yet only a small minority feel confident they’re measuring it well. IAB Europe’s own retail media committee has flagged the same root issue: ROAS is difficult to compare across platforms because of how differently each one matches identity to a sale.
Next phase of retail media beyond Amazon will require advertisers to understand their customers, their products and where they sit in the market. Brands need to develop an operating model to account for this complexity. They need to understand each network’s metrics in their own platforms, but also understand how they influence and affect each other, and how they affect their own P&Ls. Advertisers need to be able to answer not just “What ROAS am I seeing on each network?” but “What would have happened if we hadn’t spent there at all?”