Retail Media Networks: The Ad Channel Agencies Are Sleeping On

Key Takeaways:

• Retail Media Networks like Walmart Connect, Target Roundel, and Instacart Ads offer high-intent, purchase-ready audiences that most agencies are dramatically underutilizing.
• These platforms sit at the bottom of the funnel by design, reaching consumers at or near the point of purchase, making them exceptionally efficient for e-commerce conversion goals.
• First-party data from retailers gives advertisers signal quality that cookie-dependent platforms simply cannot match in a post-third-party-cookie world.
• Budget diversification across retail media channels reduces over-reliance on Amazon and Google, improving margin and competitive positioning.
• Paid media managers who build fluency in these platforms now will have a measurable advantage as the retail media market approaches $60 billion in U.S. spend.

The Blind Spot No One Is Talking About

Let me be blunt: if your channel mix in 2025 still looks like Google, Meta, and maybe Amazon, you are leaving serious performance on the table. The retail media industry has been one of the fastest-growing segments in digital advertising for three consecutive years, and a significant portion of paid media managers are still treating it like a niche experiment rather than a core acquisition channel. That is a strategic mistake, and it is one your competitors are increasingly not making.

Retail Media Networks are not a trend. They are a structural shift in how advertising inventory is created, valued, and sold. When a retailer like Walmart or Target opens up their digital properties, their app data, their loyalty program insights, and their in-store signals to advertisers, they are offering something Google and Meta fundamentally cannot: proof of purchase intent at the point of commerce. That is not incremental value. That is a category-defining advantage for performance marketers who know how to use it.

This article is for paid media managers who are serious about channel expansion and want a grounded, no-hype breakdown of why Walmart Connect, Target Roundel, and Instacart Ads deserve a real budget allocation, not a test-and-forget pilot with $500 and vague success metrics.

What Retail Media Networks Actually Are (And Why the Definition Matters)

A Retail Media Network is an advertising platform built and operated by a retailer that allows brands to purchase ad placements across that retailer’s owned digital properties, including their website, app, email, and increasingly, their in-store screens and connected TV inventory. The defining characteristic is access to the retailer’s first-party purchase data to target, optimize, and measure those ads.

This is fundamentally different from buying a banner ad on a general publisher network. When you advertise on a retail media channel, you are reaching a consumer who is either actively shopping or has a demonstrated purchase history with that specific retailer. The intent signal is not inferred from browsing behavior or demographic modeling. It is sourced from actual transaction data. That distinction should matter enormously to anyone responsible for conversion-stage performance.

The retail media market in the United States is projected to exceed $59 billion by 2028 according to eMarketer, with growth rates consistently outpacing search and social advertising. Yet agency investment in these channels remains disproportionately low relative to that growth. The gap between where the audience is going and where agency budgets are following is the opportunity.

Why Agencies Are Getting Left Behind

The reasons agencies underinvest in retail media networks are structural, not strategic. Most agency compensation models reward managing large budgets on familiar platforms. Account managers build careers on Google Ads certifications and Meta Blueprint credentials. The tooling, reporting integrations, and internal playbooks are all built around those ecosystems. Retail media platforms require agencies to learn new interfaces, new measurement frameworks, and new negotiation dynamics with retail buyers who sometimes sit in a completely different part of a client’s organization than the digital marketing team.

That friction is real. But it is also exactly the kind of friction that separates agencies who evolve from those who get replaced. The brands that are winning in retail media right now, including consumer packaged goods companies, direct-to-consumer brands, and even mid-market e-commerce retailers, are the ones who treated the learning curve as an investment rather than an obstacle.

There is also a measurement problem that scares off less experienced teams. Retail media networks use their own attribution models, and those models do not always sync cleanly with Google Analytics 4, Meta’s Ads Manager, or third-party MMPs. Instead of solving that problem, many agencies avoid the channel entirely. That is the wrong call. The measurement complexity is solvable, and the intent quality of the inventory more than justifies the effort to get the reporting right.

Walmart Connect: Underestimated Scale at the World’s Largest Retailer

Walmart Connect is arguably the most underutilized high-scale retail media channel available to U.S. advertisers today. Walmart reaches over 90% of U.S. households annually. Their digital properties, including Walmart.com and the Walmart app, attract over 120 million monthly unique visitors. And yet, for most non-CPG advertisers, Walmart Connect is barely a line item in the channel plan.

The core ad formats on Walmart Connect include Sponsored Products, which appear in search results and on product pages, Sponsored Brands, which offer banner placements at the top of category pages, and Display Ads, which can be targeted using Walmart’s first-party purchase data across both on-site and off-site placements. The off-site display network is particularly interesting for performance marketers because it allows you to reach Walmart shoppers across the broader web using Walmart’s purchase data as the targeting signal.

Here is what makes Walmart Connect genuinely compelling for e-commerce advertisers beyond Amazon’s shadow: lower competition and lower cost-per-click on high-intent keywords. Categories like home goods, electronics, personal care, and grocery frequently show CPCs on Walmart Connect that are 30 to 50 percent lower than equivalent keywords on Amazon Sponsored Products, while the shopper intent is comparably strong. For margin-conscious performance campaigns, that efficiency gap is significant.

Actionable tips for Walmart Connect:

• Start with Sponsored Products on your top five to ten SKUs and use exact match targeting to establish baseline performance data before expanding to broad match.
• Layer Walmart’s purchase-based audience segments into your Display campaigns to retarget shoppers who viewed but did not purchase your category in the last 30 days.
• Use Walmart Luminate data, available to Connect advertisers, to understand category-level basket behavior and align your bidding strategy with high-conversion shopping moments like paycheck cycles.
• Request access to the Walmart DSP through a certified partner if your monthly retail media budget exceeds $25,000, as the DSP unlocks programmatic access to Walmart’s off-site inventory with stronger audience controls.

Target Roundel: Premium Audiences With Loyalty Data Most Brands Dream About

Target Roundel operates differently from most retail media networks, and that difference is part of what makes it so valuable for the right advertiser profile. Target’s shopper base skews toward higher-income, college-educated households with strong brand affinity and significantly above-average basket sizes. The Target Circle loyalty program has over 100 million members, and that membership data feeds directly into Roundel’s targeting and measurement capabilities.

What Roundel does exceptionally well is audience curation. Rather than giving advertisers raw access to keyword-based placements, Roundel offers curated audience packages built on purchase history, life stage signals, and category affinity. If you sell premium baby products, athletic apparel, or home decor, Roundel can put your ads in front of Target Circle members who have demonstrated purchase behavior in those exact categories, not just interest-level signals from browsing data.

Roundel also has an off-site media component that extends beyond Target’s owned properties, allowing advertisers to reach Roundel audiences through programmatic display, video, audio, and social placements. The closed-loop measurement, meaning the ability to tie ad exposure directly to Target purchases, gives performance marketers a cleaner attribution story than most third-party audience buys can offer.

Actionable tips for Target Roundel:

• Engage Roundel’s managed service team early. Unlike self-serve platforms, Roundel still operates largely through a managed service model, which means your brief and creative quality matter more than your bid strategy at the outset.
• Prioritize campaigns tied to Target’s promotional calendar, including Target Deal Days and seasonal category pushes, as these moments amplify organic traffic and improve your ad’s share of a larger shopper pool.
• Use Roundel’s closed-loop reporting to calculate a true ROAS that includes both online and in-store purchase attribution, especially if your product category has meaningful offline conversion behavior.
• Test Roundel’s off-site audience segments against your Meta custom audiences for the same campaign objective, and compare CPAs rather than CPMs to evaluate true efficiency.

Instacart Ads: Capturing Grocery Intent at the Highest-Frequency Purchase Category

Instacart Ads is the retail media channel that gets the least attention outside of CPG and grocery verticals, and that is a significant missed opportunity for a wider range of e-commerce advertisers. Instacart has evolved from a grocery delivery app into a full-stack retail media platform with sophisticated targeting, auction-based bidding, and measurable conversion data tied directly to add-to-cart and purchase events.

The grocery category is the highest-frequency consumer purchase category in existence. Households make grocery purchasing decisions multiple times per week. The habit formation and brand switching that happens at the grocery level has downstream effects on consumer brand relationships across other categories. Advertising on Instacart is not just about selling food products. It is about reaching consumers at the moment they are already in a purchasing mindset, with their wallet effectively open.

Instacart Ads offers Featured Products, which function similarly to Sponsored Products on Amazon, Display Ads that appear across the Instacart app experience, and Shoppable Display that allows brands to attach a direct purchase mechanic to their creative. The platform also now offers Instacart’s Carrot Ads, which extend Instacart’s retail media inventory to advertisers who want access to Instacart’s audience data outside of the Instacart app itself.

For non-grocery e-commerce advertisers, Instacart’s partnership network, which includes retailers like Petco, Sephora, Best Buy, and Costco, means that the platform’s audience and intent data extends meaningfully beyond the grocery aisle. If your product category has any adjacency to these retail partners, Instacart Ads warrants serious evaluation.

Actionable tips for Instacart Ads:

• Begin with Featured Product campaigns on your hero SKUs and set bids to achieve top-three placement in category search results, as Instacart’s search algorithm weights recent conversion rate into organic ranking, creating a compounding benefit from paid placements.
• Use Instacart’s keyword reporting to identify high-converting search terms and feed those learnings back into your broader Google Shopping and Amazon keyword strategy.
• For brands in personal care, pet, beauty, or home categories, activate campaigns specifically tied to Instacart’s retail partner inventory to reach shoppers who are already browsing adjacent categories with purchase intent.
• Benchmark your Instacart ROAS against grocery-category norms rather than your Amazon benchmarks, as basket sizes and purchase frequencies differ enough to require separate performance expectations.

The First-Party Data Advantage You Cannot Replicate Elsewhere

Here is the argument that should end the debate about whether retail media networks deserve serious budget consideration: in a world where third-party cookies are functionally dead and signal loss from iOS privacy changes has degraded Meta and Google’s targeting precision, the first-party purchase data that powers retail media networks is the most accurate targeting signal available in digital advertising.

When Walmart, Target, or Instacart tells you that a specific audience segment has purchased in your category three times in the last 90 days, that is not a probabilistic model built on browser behavior. That is transaction history. The fidelity of that signal translates directly into targeting efficiency, which translates into lower wasted spend and higher conversion rates at comparable or lower CPCs than you will find on platforms still rebuilding their targeting infrastructure around modeled data.

Performance marketers who have been frustrated by the post-iOS 14 degradation of Meta ROAS or the rising CPCs on Google Shopping should be looking at retail media channels as a structural solution, not just a supplementary tactic. The signal quality is better, the intent is higher, and the measurement, while imperfect, is increasingly tied to actual purchase outcomes rather than click-through proxies.

How to Build a Retail Media Channel Strategy That Actually Works

The agencies and in-house teams that are succeeding in retail media are not just running experiments. They are building repeatable frameworks that treat retail media as a performance channel with its own playbook, its own KPIs, and its own optimization cadence. Here is how to structure that approach:

• Audit your retail presence first. Before you spend a dollar on retail media ads, make sure your product listings on Walmart.com, Target.com, or Instacart are fully optimized. Titles, images, descriptions, and reviews directly affect your ad’s conversion rate. Running paid traffic to a poorly optimized listing is burning budget.
• Set channel-specific KPIs. Do not apply your Amazon ROAS targets to Walmart Connect without adjustment. Each retail media channel has different average order values, category dynamics, and attribution windows. Establish baseline performance benchmarks in the first 60 days before setting optimization targets.
• Separate your brand and non-brand strategies. Retail media networks are particularly effective for conquesting competitors’ shoppers through non-brand category keywords. Build a deliberate conquesting strategy alongside your brand defense campaigns rather than letting your budget default to protecting existing demand.
• Invest in creative that matches the commerce context. Retail media placements live in a shopping environment. Creative that works on Instagram does not necessarily work on Walmart.com. Prioritize product-forward imagery, clear value propositions, and promotional callouts that match how shoppers are already thinking when they are browsing a retail platform.
• Build a unified measurement approach. Work with your retail media partners to export campaign data into a centralized reporting environment, whether that is a BI tool like Looker or Tableau or a dedicated MMP. Standardize your attribution window definitions across channels so you can make valid cross-channel comparisons.

The Competitive Landscape Is Moving Fast

Retail media is not a secret anymore, but it is still an asymmetric opportunity. The brands and agencies who have built genuine competency in Walmart Connect, Target Roundel, and Instacart Ads over the last two years are sitting on a growing advantage as more advertisers begin to move budget toward these channels. The window for capturing below-market CPCs and above-average placement share on these platforms will narrow as competition increases.

The comparison to early Amazon Advertising is instructive. Paid media managers who built Amazon Sponsored Products expertise in 2016 and 2017 captured extraordinary returns that are now much harder to achieve as the platform has matured and CPCs have risen significantly. The same dynamic is playing out right now on Walmart Connect, Roundel, and Instacart. The early movers are getting the performance. Everyone else will pay more for less when they finally catch up.

For paid media managers evaluating channel expansion for e-commerce clients, the question is not whether retail media networks will become mainstream. They already are. The question is whether you are going to be ahead of that curve or chasing it.

Final Take: Stop Treating Retail Media as Optional

The ad channels that win the next five years in performance marketing are going to be the ones with the best signal, the closest proximity to purchase intent, and the most durable targeting infrastructure in a privacy-first environment. Retail Media Networks check all three of those boxes in ways that most traditional paid media channels do not.

Walmart Connect, Target Roundel, and Instacart Ads are not supplementary channels to activate when Google and Meta are maxed out. They are foundational performance channels that belong in every serious e-commerce client’s media mix. The paid media managers who internalize that argument and act on it now are the ones who will be showing the strongest results two years from now. The ones who wait for the industry consensus to catch up will be explaining to their clients why their competitors figured it out first.

Stop sleeping on retail media. The inventory is there, the intent is real, and the opportunity will not stay this accessible for long.

Glossary of Terms

• Retail Media Network (RMN): An advertising platform built by a retailer that allows brands to purchase placements across that retailer’s owned digital and physical properties, powered by the retailer’s first-party purchase data.
• Walmart Connect: Walmart’s retail media advertising platform offering Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, and Display Ads both on-site and off-site using Walmart’s first-party shopper data.
• Target Roundel: Target’s proprietary retail media network offering curated audience segments built from Target Circle loyalty data, with on-site and off-site media capabilities and closed-loop measurement.
• Instacart Ads: The retail media advertising solution within the Instacart platform, offering Featured Products, Display Ads, and Shoppable Display formats tied to grocery and adjacent retail purchase intent.
• First-Party Data: Data collected directly by a company from its own customers through owned touchpoints such as purchases, loyalty programs, and app interactions, without reliance on third parties.
• Sponsored Products: A pay-per-click ad format on retail media platforms that places a brand’s product listing in prominent positions within search results and product pages.
• Closed-Loop Measurement: An attribution model where ad exposure and resulting purchase behavior are both measured within the same data environment, allowing direct linkage between advertising spend and sales outcomes.
• ROAS (Return on Ad Spend): A performance metric calculated by dividing revenue generated by advertising spend, used to evaluate the efficiency of paid media campaigns.
• CPC (Cost Per Click): The amount an advertiser pays each time a user clicks on their ad within a paid media platform.
• DSP (Demand-Side Platform): A technology platform that allows advertisers to purchase digital ad inventory programmatically across multiple publishers and ad exchanges from a single interface.
• CPG (Consumer Packaged Goods): Products that are sold quickly, consumed regularly, and replaced frequently, such as food, beverages, personal care products, and household items.
• Attribution Window: The defined period of time after an ad interaction during which a resulting conversion is credited to that specific ad exposure.
• MMP (Mobile Measurement Partner): A third-party platform that tracks and attributes mobile app marketing activity across multiple ad networks, providing standardized performance data.
• Conquesting: A paid media strategy in which an advertiser bids on keywords or audience segments associated with competitor brands or products to capture market share from competing offers.
• Carrot Ads: Instacart’s off-platform advertising product that extends Instacart’s first-party retail audience data to programmatic placements beyond the Instacart app.
• Walmart Luminate: A data analytics product from Walmart that provides brands with shopper behavior insights including purchase patterns, basket composition, and category trends.

Further Reading

• McKinsey: Retail Media: The New Growth Opportunity for Brands
• Harvard Business Review: The Rise of Retail Media Advertising
• Forrester: Retail Media Networks Are Ready for Prime Time
• Search Engine Land: A Performance Marketer’s Guide to Retail Media Networks
• eMarketer: US Retail Media Ad Spending Forecast