How retail data is helping to deliver outsized returns across markets

These numbers show retail data is becoming a measurable performance lever across markets, categories, channels, and funnel stages. 

Here’s a closer look at the impact:

Adoption is expanding across categories

Retail data adoption is growing as advertisers look for more direct connections between media investment and commerce outcomes. 

Over the past 12 months, retail data adoption grew and matured for advertisers on The Trade Desk’s platform across verticals: 

• Over a third of advertisers globally activated retail targeting data on The Trade Desk’s platform, up nearly 20% year over year. 

• CPG remains one of the most penetrated categories. 

• E‑commerce, retail, and financial services are among the fastest-growing categories adopting retail data.¹

These trends affirm that purchase signals can inform many different types of campaigns. While a CPG brand may use retail data to reach category buyers, a travel brand may use it to identify consumers whose purchase patterns suggest a life-stage change. 

In either case, the value is the same: Retail data is helping advertisers move from broad audience assumptions toward signals based on what people actually do.

Increasingly, advertisers are finding that retail data strategies, at every stage, can: 

• Upper funnel: Build reach against audiences with stronger category relevance. 

• Mid funnel: Refine consideration strategies using shopping behavior. 

• Lower funnel: Support goals such as CPA, ROAS, and new buyer acquisition. 

Instead of relying on separate signals for awareness, consideration, and conversion, you can use purchase-based insights to connect those stages more clearly.

How to put retail data to work in your campaigns

Retail data is most useful when you connect the signal to a clear campaign objective, like audience segmentation, off-site growth, or product-specific messaging.

Lean into audience building

Use retail data to reach people based on shopping behavior, such as product views, online or in-store purchases, price-range browsing, repeat purchasing, brand loyalty, category buying, or competitor purchasing. 
 
These signals can support several audience strategies, helping advertisers drive results across every phase of their campaigns: 

Find likely new buyers: Use retail data as a seed to identify people who resemble your highest-value customers or shoppers. 

Reach category buyers: Build audiences around people who have purchased within a relevant category. 

Reconnect with lapsed customers: Identify shoppers who bought previously but have not purchased recently. 

Engage loyal customers: Reach repeat buyers with new products, bundles, or higher-value offers. 

Expand into life-stage audiences: Use purchase patterns to reach groups such as new pet owners, frequent travelers, or recent movers.

Expand to off-site growth

Extend audiences off-site across the open internet. Instead of limiting retail media to sponsored placements on a retailer’s site or app, apply retail signals to different channels, like: 

• CTV

• Display

• Online video

• Audio

• Digital out-of-home 

This can give you more ways to connect commerce intelligence to the media environments where consumers spend time throughout the day.

Retail data drives incremental sales

To test whether retail data truly drives performance, The Trade Desk ran an analysis spanning 11 brands and 8 retailer datasets across grocery, big-box, and specialty categories, using Attain as a retail-agnostic measurement layer. The question was straightforward: Does retail data on The Trade Desk generate incremental sales? 

The results were decisive. Every campaign in the study drove statistically significant incremental sales and transaction lift. All of them produced measurable sales that would not have happened without the advertising, a clear signal of genuine, net-new demand. Ninety percent of campaigns beat Attain’s industry benchmarks for new-buyer ROAS, outperforming them by an average of 122%. 

Retail data also lifted average transaction value from attributed consumers by 23% relative to those brands’ trailing 12-month norms, highlighting that buyers were spending more when they converted. 

Together, these findings make a strong case for retail data as a driver of real, incremental business outcomes, not just a tool for validating reach.

The bottom line: Make retail data actionable across your campaign

You can take these steps to help unlock the full value of retail data in your campaigns: 

• Plan around shoppers who show real category or product interest. 

• Activate those audiences across premium off-site channels. 

• Message based on where someone is in the shopping journey. 

• Measure against outcomes such as sales, ROAS, product performance, or new buyers. 

• Optimize toward the signals most closely tied to the business goal.

Retail data connects what people buy with how advertisers plan, activate, and measure media. The advertisers that can get the most from it will be the ones that use it as a signal for building audiences, shaping full-funnel strategy, improving off-site activation, and measuring real business outcomes. 

This information is provided solely for background and is not a representation or guarantee of any future performance.
 
<sub>Source:
1. The Trade Desk platform data, Global, June 2025 – June 2026. Note: Excludes WMT DSP.</sub>