Marketing is commonly broken down into two groups: brand and performance. Where brand marketing is about upper-funnel advertising, performance is where you spend money to drive sales. Attribution is important in performance marketing, as brands want to be able to measure the success rate of their advertising by tying impressions to concrete sales numbers.

Commerce Marketing Is Performance Marketing With Greater Accountability

Brands want to know what is driving sales with more precision and how marketing efforts are making those sales happen. Commerce marketing is growing rapidly among performance marketers because it offers a level of accountability that has never been achieved before.

However, the term commerce marketing is somewhat broad. It includes product-focused ads that direct customers to where they can make a purchase, as well as retail media with its robust product-purchase data.

Retail Media Fulfills The Promise Of Performance Marketing

Retail media is far more precise with ads that appear on a retailer’s e-commerce assets close to the point of purchase or harness that valuable purchase data across the web. It also gives brands access to anonymized product-purchase data so they can close the loop on their commerce marketing efforts.

It’s not hard to see why commerce marketing, and specifically retail media, would quickly become a popular form of performance marketing. Especially for CPG brands, as it gives them what they’ve always wanted from performance: a direct, measurable line from ad to sale.

Unsurprisingly, retail media ad spend is expected to grow by 75 billion over the next four years according to eMarketer.