The main benefit of onsite retail media is that it gets brands very close to the point of purchase in a straightforward way. When a customer is searching for something on a retailer’s website, they’re reliably in purchase mode. It’s the perfect opportunity to send a relevant ad featuring a brand’s product.

No other marketing channel will get you access to the consumer at this stage in the buyer’s journey. But there’s a big limitation to onsite retail media. The ad inventory on a retailer’s e-commerce asset are primarily sponsored search ads. They respond to whatever search query was input or which product a user clicked on.

Offsite Opens Up The Full Scope Of Retail Media

With offsite retail media, the ad formats are much richer and more immersive. You can have banner, video, CTV ads and more. They can be placed on social platforms, YouTube or as display ads on a publisher’s domain. Brands have a lot more options than with onsite search ads.

Offsite ads are also more likely to factor in rich user data. Not only are they able to take past purchase data into consideration, they can include in-store data as well. All of this data is of course, first-party data, making it privacy-law friendly.

It should also be stated that many retailers still operate predominantly in the physical space and may not have the kinds of immense web traffic that large global players like Amazon see. This means onsite inventory can be limited, whereas offsite represents a big opportunity for finding those customers wherever they are browsing the web leading to larger-scale campaigns.

It’s not surprising to see that marketers are embracing offsite as part of their retail media strategy. According to emarketer, over half of advertisers who use offsite retail media plan on allocating even more of their budget to it in the future.