Bigeye's Retail Disrupted study of 1,501 US shoppers found that 44% prefer to shop in stores and 21% prefer online. A retail media strategy for 2027 has to be judged on total sales the ads caused, in the store and on the app, because the retailer's dashboard counts only the part it can see. Bigeye, the Orlando agency for consumer brands, plans and runs these programs through its retail media practice.

This playbook lays out eight steps, in the order Bigeye works them, with the numbers behind each one.

Key takeaways

• Bigeye found that 44% of US shoppers prefer to shop in stores and 21% prefer online. A plan measured only on online orders misses most of what retail media does.

• Bigeye found that 89% of shoppers say a product's visual appeal matters to which brand they choose. On a retailer's site, that decision happens at the hero image.

• Amazon took 79.7% of US retail media ad spend in 2025 and Walmart took 8.0%, according to eMarketer.

• McKinsey found that 53% of advertisers now buy from five or more retail media networks, up from 38% in 2023.

• Only 15% of brands report strong confidence in how their retail media is measured, according to Skai and Stratably's 2026 State of Retail Media report.

What is a retail media strategy?

A retail media strategy is a brand's plan for buying advertising from the retailers that sell its products. It sets which retailer networks get budget, what each one is for, how the spend relates to trade funding, and how the brand will prove the ads caused sales that wouldn't have happened without them.

Most plans skip the last part. They pick networks, set a return target, and report the retailer's number back to finance. The eight steps below start somewhere else.

The numbers to plan around

Step 1: Fix the product page before you buy a click

Get the listing right first: main image, title, bullets, enhanced content and reviews. A retail media ad sends a shopper to a product page, and a weak page wastes every click the budget buys. Bigeye found that 89% of shoppers say visual appeal matters to which brand they choose.

Bigeye's In Clear Focus podcast covered this in September 2026. In The Digital Shelf, Tested, Daniela Bolzmann, founder and CEO of Mindful Goods, walks through what split tests on Amazon listings show: main images drive the click, enhanced content does most of the selling, and photos of the product in use beat staged shots.

Run the check retailer by retailer. A page that works on Amazon often breaks on Walmart, where image specs and content modules differ. For pet brands, this guide covers Chewy product page optimization field by field.

Step 2: Put the money where your cases sell

Rank your retailers by sales volume and fund their networks in that order. Amazon took 79.7% of US retail media ad spend in 2025, according to eMarketer. McKinsey found 53% of advertisers buy from five or more networks, up from 38% in 2023. Most brands are spread wider than their sales justify.

Why does that matter? Every network added brings its own minimums, its own reporting and its own account team asking for more. The work multiplies faster than the sales do.

For most CPG brands the list is short. Amazon if you sell there. Walmart Connect if Walmart is a top-three customer. Then one or two of Target Roundel, Kroger Precision Marketing, Instacart or Chewy, chosen by where the product moves. Bigeye manages more than 50 networks and still starts most plans with three.

Step 3: Decide what retail media is paying for

Write down which budget each retail media dollar comes from and what it's meant to do. McKinsey's 2025 commerce media survey found advertisers fund increases mainly by moving money out of social (21%) and digital display (18%). That's brand-building money, moved to a channel that mostly converts existing demand.

So name the job. Some spend is a cost of doing business with the retailer, agreed in the joint business plan alongside trade. Call it that, and don't expect it to grow the brand. Some spend is there to win new buyers. Hold that part to a harder standard.

Sales and marketing have to build this plan in the same room. When the sales team commits retail media dollars in a buyer meeting and marketing finds out later, the brand ends up funding the same promotion twice.

Step 4: Defend your name, then go buy new customers

Split every search campaign into branded and non-branded terms, and report them apart. Branded search protects sales you already had. Non-branded search and category placements are where new buyers come from. Blended together, the first makes the second look better than it is.

Cover your brand terms at the lowest bid that holds the top slot. Competitors will bid on your name if you leave it open, so some defense is necessary. But it's a tax, and it should be budgeted like one.

Then put the growth budget on category terms, competitor terms and audience placements, and judge it on new-to-brand buyers. Amazon and Walmart both report that figure. Two guides go deeper on the mechanics: the 12 Walmart ad metrics that guide spend and best practices for Walmart Sponsored Brands ads.

Step 5: Test for incrementality before you scale

Run a holdout or sales lift test on each network before raising its budget. Only 15% of brands report strong confidence in their retail media measurement, according to Skai and Stratably's 2026 State of Retail Media report. The retailer's dashboard reports attributed sales. It can't tell you which ones the ad caused.

There's now a standard to hold networks to. The IAB and the Media Rating Council published Retail Media Measurement Guidelines in January 2024, and the IAB followed with guidelines for incremental measurement in commerce media in November 2025. Ask each network which parts it follows.

Here's the catch: a proper test means turning ads off somewhere, and nobody wants to be the one who paused spend before a retailer review. Do it anyway, in a few matched markets, for four to six weeks. Bigeye's guide to retail media ROI has the formula and the test designs.

Step 6: Plan the store and the app as one sale

Count in-store sales when you judge retail media, and use in-store placements where the retailer offers them. Bigeye's Retail Disrupted study found 44% of US shoppers prefer stores and 21% prefer online. NielsenIQ reports that nearly 94% of grocery shoppers bought both ways in 2025.

An ad seen in the Kroger app on Tuesday often becomes a purchase in a Kroger store on Saturday. If your reporting stops at online orders, that sale never shows up, and the campaign looks worse than it was.

Ask each network for closed-loop reporting that includes store sales, and check how it matches ad exposure to loyalty card purchases. In-store screens and audio are still small. eMarketer puts in-store at 3.3% of non-Amazon retail media spend in 2025. Test them where your category has a display, and don't build the plan around them yet.

Step 7: Go off-site only when on-site is full

Buy the retailer's off-site inventory after you've run out of efficient on-site placements. McKinsey found advertisers now put 44% of commerce media budgets off-site, up from 41%. Off-site uses the retailer's shopper data to reach people on other sites, streaming TV and social.

It's useful for one thing: reaching known category buyers who haven't bought your brand. That's a real audience, and it's hard to build any other way.

But the price includes a data markup, and the measurement is weaker than on-site search. Compare the cost against buying the same streaming or social inventory directly with your own audience. If the retailer's version can't show more new-to-brand buyers per dollar in a lift test, buy it the ordinary way.

Step 8: Get your listings ready for AI shopping assistants

Rewrite product content so an AI shopping assistant can answer a question with it. Amazon's Rufus and the assistants other retailers are testing read titles, bullets, reviews and customer Q&A, then recommend a few products. Keyword-stuffed listings give them nothing to work with.

Start with the questions shoppers ask. Read your own reviews and Q&A, and your competitors', and list what people want to know: who it's for, what's in it, how it compares, what it doesn't do. Answer each in a plain sentence in the listing.

This is the same work Bigeye does for search assistants outside the retailer. Its AI SEO and GEO practice starts by recording what assistants say about a brand today, then fixes the pages they read.

Network roles at a glance

What it looks like in practice

Florida Crystals is the clearest retail media case in Bigeye's food work. Bigeye ran full-funnel media across social, digital and retail media networks, with holiday baking campaigns timed to peak demand and outcomes tracked down to add-to-cart actions. The case study reports triple-digit growth as the brand moved from regional favorite to national contender.

Zesty Paws shows what the brand side buys you. Bigeye built the brand architecture and messaging, and the campaigns ran on Amazon, Chewy and social platforms. The brand became the number one pet supplement in the US and sold to H&H Group for $610 million, as the case study describes.

Bigeye's read

Bigeye's view is that a high retail media ROAS is usually a warning. It tends to mean the budget is sitting on branded search, reaching people who typed your name and were about to buy anyway.

Retailers have every reason to keep it that way. Walmart Connect's US ad business grew 43% in the quarter ended July 2026, according to Walmart's earnings release. Growth like that comes from brands raising budgets, and brands raise budgets when the dashboard shows a strong return. Branded search always shows one.

The plans that grow a brand look worse on paper. Shift money to category terms and new-to-brand audiences and the reported ROAS drops, sometimes by half. New buyers go up. So does the argument with finance.

Bigeye would rather have that argument. Agree on new-to-brand buyers and incremental sales as the measures before the year starts, and report ROAS as a secondary number. The related playbooks for CPG marketing strategy and food and beverage marketing strategy show where retail media fits in the wider plan.

Frequently asked questions

What is retail media?

Retail media is advertising a brand buys from a retailer, placed on the retailer's site, app and stores or on other sites using the retailer's shopper data. Amazon Ads, Walmart Connect, Target Roundel, Kroger Precision Marketing and Instacart Ads are the largest US examples. The retailer's purchase data is what sets it apart from other digital advertising.

How much should a brand spend on retail media?

There's no single right share. Bigeye sets the budget retailer by retailer, in proportion to where the brand's volume sells, and raises it only after a lift test. eMarketer expects 89% of new US retail media dollars in 2026 to go to Amazon and Walmart, so most brands should concentrate.

Which retail media networks should a CPG brand start with?

Start with the networks of your two or three largest retail customers. For most brands that means Amazon Ads and Walmart Connect, which together took almost 88% of US retail media ad spend in 2025 according to eMarketer, then one grocery or specialty network where the product sells well.

What is a good ROAS for retail media?

It depends on what the money is buying. Branded search often reports a very high return because those shoppers were already looking for you. Bigeye judges retail media on incremental sales and new-to-brand buyers, proven in a lift test, and treats reported ROAS as a secondary number.

Do retail media ads drive in-store sales?

Yes, and often more than online sales. Bigeye's Retail Disrupted study of 1,501 US shoppers found 44% prefer stores and 21% prefer online. Ask each network for closed-loop reporting that matches ad exposure to loyalty card purchases in stores, or the campaign will look weaker than it was.

What does Bigeye do in retail media?

Bigeye plans and manages retail media for consumer brands across more than 50 networks, including Walmart Connect, Chewy, Target Roundel, Kroger Precision Marketing and Instacart Ads. The work covers product page readiness, budget by retailer, creative for each network, and measurement tied to retail sales lift.

Talk to a retail media strategist

If your 2027 retail media plan needs a second set of eyes, Bigeye's retail media team will walk through it with you. Start the conversation.

Sources: Bigeye, Retail Disrupted (2021); Bigeye, In Clear Focus podcast (Sep 2026); eMarketer (Nov 2025, Jan 2026, Jun 2026); McKinsey (May 2025); Walmart (Aug 2026); Instacart (Aug 2026); Skai and Stratably (Jul 2026); IAB and Media Rating Council (Jan 2024); IAB (Nov 2025); NielsenIQ (Apr 2026).