Sales attributed to an ad and sales that would not have happened without it are not the same thing. This distinction is becoming increasingly important to advertisers investing in retail media, according to the third edition of the Attitudes to Retail Media report, published by IAB Europe on 3 November. Retailers and their media networks are being asked for more precise answers about campaigns’ contribution to business results, while measurement capabilities have yet to meet all those expectations.
The shift is particularly visible in attitudes towards ROAS, the measure of return on ad spend. Among European respondents who buy media, the share requesting it from retail media networks fell from 89% in 2025 to 49% in 2026. Ahead of it now are unified online and offline reporting, wanted by 66% of respondents, new-to-brand or new-to-category customer measurement at 63%, and incrementality at 57%.
The latter metric seeks to answer how many additional results a campaign generated compared with what would have happened without advertising. ROAS alone does not provide that answer. Its lower position among priorities therefore does not mean advertisers are abandoning return measurement, but that they expect more from measurement. The authors also caution that this year’s list of available metrics was expanded, which may have partly contributed to the decline in the share selecting ROAS.
These expectations come from increasingly long-standing partnerships. Among European media buyers, 71% have been working with retailers for more than a year, compared with 64% in 2025 and 51% in 2024. Yet, across the overall buyer sample, only 12% rate their own approach to retail media at the highest level of sophistication. Longer experience with this form of advertising clearly does not yet imply a fully developed strategy.
Access to retailer data remains a strong reason to invest. As many as 81% of European media buyers see an opportunity in the data retailers collect directly through their relationships with customers. At the same time, the share identifying a lack of available data as a barrier rose from 31% to 58% in a year. A lack of measurement and reporting is cited by 61%, while a lack of standardisation and fragmentation of retail media networks are each identified by 56%.
Attribution, or the process of assigning results to individual advertising touchpoints, illustrates how expectations differ from what is available. Across the overall sample, 58% of media buyers want a model that takes multiple touchpoints along the path to purchase into account, while 31% of sell-side respondents offer it. This group includes retailers, media owners and retail media networks.
The pressure to improve measurement is already reflected in development plans: 63% of sell-side respondents intend to enhance their measurement offering over the next 12 months, making it their most frequently cited development priority.
In parallel, they are preparing for shopping in which AI assistants will play a greater role. Developing AI-powered campaign management and optimisation is planned by 68% of sell-side respondents, while half intend to develop capabilities for agentic commerce and product discovery through conversations with AI systems. The report cautions, however, that there is still no agreed way to measure product discovery within an AI assistant’s answers. This adds another question to the existing ones about campaign effectiveness: how should a product recommendation made within a conversation be valued?
The research covers 150 respondents from advertisers, agencies, retailers and retail media networks, and this year also includes a sample from the Middle East and North Africa. The number of responses varies by question, while comparisons with previous years were made using the European sample. The quantitative analysis was prepared by Caras Consulting, while Ascentinel conducted supplementary qualitative research through interviews with 18 participants.
The full report is available on the website of IAB Europe.
