Retail media reporting is drowning in numbers: impressions, clicks, CTR, CPC, ROAS, share of voice, new-to-brand, and a dozen more. Most of them are noise. If you only track one thing, track attributed sales — the actual dollars of product moved that the retailer’s own system credits to your advertising.
Why attributed sales is the honest number
Here’s what makes retail media different from every other kind of advertising: the ad and the purchase happen in the same place. When you run a sponsored placement on Instacart, Walmart, or Amazon, the retailer sees the shopper click and sees them buy — and it records exactly how much product that ad moved. That’s not a model. Not an estimate. Not a “brand lift study” built on assumptions. It’s the retailer telling you, in its own books: this ad sold this much.
Almost no other channel can do that. Which is why, when we report to a client, attributed sales is the number we lead with — and it’s the number you should demand from anyone running your media.
The metrics designed to distract you
Impressions and clicks feel good and mean little on their own — you can rack up millions of both while selling nothing. CTR and CPC are useful for tuning, not for judging success. And ROAS (return on ad spend) is the sneakiest, because it looks like the answer. A sky-high ROAS often just means you were bidding on people who’d have bought you anyway — you paid to take credit for sales you already had. A great-looking ROAS on tiny spend can be hiding the fact that you’re barely growing at all.
If a report can’t tie your spend back to product actually moved, be suspicious. Everything else is a vanity metric dressed up in a nicer font.
How to read a report in 60 seconds
You don’t need an analyst. Ask three questions of any retail media report:
- How much product did we move, and did that number go up? That’s attributed sales, and it’s the headline. Everything else is supporting detail.
- What did it cost us to move it? Spend against attributed sales tells you whether the growth is profitable. You want incremental sales at a price that still makes you money — not the biggest ROAS on the smallest budget.
- What’s changing over time? One month is a data point. The trend across three or four months is the truth. Is attributed sales climbing while cost stays sane? Good. Is ROAS gorgeous but total sales flat? You’re not actually growing.
Plain English, always
If someone hands you a report you need a degree to decode, that’s a choice they made — and usually not one made in your favor. The number that matters is simple: product moved. A good partner reports on it plainly, ties it to what they did, and tells you what’s next. No black box, no jargon wall, nothing you can’t explain to yourself.
Want a straight read on whether your current numbers actually mean growth? Send us a couple of details and we’ll give you an honest look — in plain English, tied to the one metric that matters.
