Retail Media Decoded #2

Decoding Retail Media to Give Brands the Clarity They Need

An interview with Mathieu Saudemont, Managing Director France, Unlimitail

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Unlimitail has just released the second edition of Retail Media Decoded, a comprehensive infographic showcasing key performance metrics from across your network. What’s the goal of this document?

The aim is to provide brands and media agencies with in-depth insights into the performance of e-retail media campaigns on the Unlimitail network, and to offer them concrete benchmarks to better manage and optimize their Retail Media strategies.

We all know how powerful this channel has become, but today, brands expect more than just reach—they want to understand which combinations of tactics perform best, why they work, and how to implement them effectively.

With Retail Media Decoded, we’ve drawn from over a year’s worth of consolidated campaign data across 59 e-commerce sites in our network. It’s a reliable and comprehensive resource to understand Retail Media best practices—for brands, agencies, and retailers alike. But today, let’s focus on the brands.

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‍What are the key takeaways from this study?

The first major insight—clearly reflected in the KPI analysis—is the importance of strategic visibility across the main shopper touchpoints and traffic hubs on retailer sites.

More specifically, when a brand appears on the homepage and on category and search pages, the conversion rate is 4 times higher than when the campaign is limited to just search or category placements. This demonstrates how combining branding and visibility formats with more targeted formats (like search or sponsored products) significantly boosts campaign performance. It supports our belief in a full-funnel strategy—brand presence at every stage of the journey—to drive conversions more effectively.

The second key takeaway relates to campaign duration. We found that running high-frequency campaigns over shorter time frames leads to better performance and continuous improvements in ROAS, all while maintaining visibility throughout the shopper journey. These short bursts also align well with product lifecycle stages—without any saturation effect on conversions.

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You place special emphasis on the concept of “Brand Halo ROAS.” Why is this KPI becoming central?

While there are various measurement methods (like ROAS per SKU or Brand Halo ROAS), it's crucial to remember the core purpose of e-retail media: to generate brand preference at the heart of the shopper journey, while also driving sales performance.

Brands have precise goals in their retail media strategies—promoting a top-selling SKU, launching a new product, or driving traffic to core assortments. In this context, measuring impact at the brand level is essential to assess a campaign’s real effectiveness.

In our study—particularly in the Grocery category—we found that Brand Halo ROAS averages 5.7, which is twice as high as ROAS measured only for the directly advertised SKUs. This clearly shows that e-retail media can boost conversions and value across an entire product range, not just the highlighted items.

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What practices are emerging in terms of formats?

As expected—and quite naturally on e-commerce sites—Sponsored Products are everywhere in e-retail media strategies. On average, nearly 7 out of 10 campaigns include this format in their media mix.

We also see a strong preference for keyword-based formats, which are widely adopted by both brands and agencies.

However, when analyzing the effectiveness of format combinations, it becomes clear: combining Display ads with Sponsored Products leads to double the ROAS compared to using Sponsored Products alone.

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You also highlight the concept of Brand Halo ROAS. Why is this KPI becoming so important?

Because it reflects the overall impact of the campaign on the brand — not just on the activated products.

Our data shows that Brand Halo ROAS is roughly twice as high as Product ROAS. In the grocery sector, it reaches an average of 5.7, proving that retail media influences far beyond the featured products.

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This edition focuses on onsite activation. What about the role of offsite data activation, the other key pillar of retail media?

Just as it’s now essential for brands to cover the full shopper journey on retail sites, we’ve seen that targeting those same shoppers outside the e-commerce ecosystem further enhances conversion rates and revenue.

We’re now able to connect exposure and conversions both on and off retail sites, and we've seen that shoppers exposed both onsite and offsite have an average e-commerce basket value that's 22% higher than those exposed onsite only. That’s a major breakthrough for brands looking to optimize all aspects of the digital customer journey.

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To wrap up, what’s the promise of this infographic for brands?

This document is meant as a strategic steering tool. It’s not about providing one-size-fits-all truths, but about offering practical insights into what works—based on wide-scale and ongoing observation.

Brands are looking for clarity and actionable optimization levers. With Retail Media Decoded, we’re giving them the keys to take their strategies further. And this is just the beginning—we plan to make this a regular release, each edition exploring different angles of retail media. In fact, our first edition focused on performance benchmarks for retailers.

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