RANCHO PALOS VERDES, CALIF. — Best Buy can tie almost all its transactions back to individual customers, an ability the company considers market leading that’s based on precise measurement and attribution across the complex consumer electronics purchase path.
“We have a 93% revenue identification rate. So what that means is 93% of our transactions we can tie back to a customer and that’s pretty compelling — and that’s market leading,” Jen Jensen, VP of Agency Partnerships for Best Buy Ads, told Beet.TV contributor David Kaplan at the Beet Retreat LA.
Combined with eight million paid loyalty members and database coverage reaching 80% of the U.S. population, this identification capability provides a measurement foundation that Jensen said separates Best Buy from competitors facing lower match rates.
Where research happens
Consumer electronics purchases involve extended consideration periods with repeated movement between online research, in-store evaluation, and final transaction channels, creating measurement complexity that Best Buy’s data infrastructure addresses.
“You’re probably going to go online, research it a little bit,” Jensen said, outlining the typical shopper journey. “You’re going to compare brands. Then you’re probably going to go into a Best Buy store. You want to feel it, you want to engage with it, you want to probably talk to a blue shirt, ask questions. You might buy it there, or you might say, ‘I’m going to go back online, do a little bit more research.’”
About 45% of customers return to Best Buy stores for pickup after online purchase, creating touchpoints that inform attribution models spanning weeks or months of consideration.
Microsoft Copilot takes off
Jensen pointed to campaign partnership with Microsoft to promote the software giant’s AI platform Copilot. Best Buy leveraged laptop consumer data to identify “upgrade readiness signals” to see which consumers would be interested in using Microsoft’s AI tool.
“We were kind of digging in and understanding when they are ready to upgrade? What are the use cases that will get them to upgrade?” Jensen said. “We built a pretty cool campaign that we brought to about nine brands. They all wanted in because they wanted to say the consumer was ready to upgrade to this new technology.”
Closing the loop with CTV
Best Buy’s work with over-the-top TV platform Roku combined first-party data precision with connected TV brand-building capabilities and emerging formats like buy-now buttons that bridge awareness and conversion.
“When you think of that plus a partner like Roku, for us, that’s really important because you can really precisely target. Then you can also have closed loop reporting, which we know everybody wants,” Jensen said.
The integration enables simultaneous brand storytelling and performance demonstration through formats that didn’t exist in traditional television advertising.
AI optimizes across Google ecosystem
Google’s Performance Max product enables optimization across the company’s entire product portfolio while leveraging Best Buy’s first-party data, creating more performant media through automated allocation.
Best Buy is also deploying AI within its app to create custom experiences, serving relevant laptop content and advertising simultaneously when customers shop specific categories.
“You can have more dynamic creative, you can have more relevance for the customer. You just get to better performance and then you can scale it much faster,” Jensen said.
Media company ambitions
Best Buy positions itself as a media company and retailer rather than limiting its identity to retail media network, pursuing offsite expansion including Social Plus product with Meta and Instagram that leverages first-party data.
“We don’t want to just be in retail media,” Jensen said. “We want to be a media company. We’re a retailer and a media company. We want to continue to find ways like with what we’re doing with CTV to leverage our first party data to get to that place where you can have this full funnel solution.”
Looking at Best Buy’s 2026 roadmap, Jensen said to expect new tools enabling advertisers to understand campaign performance, advancing measurement toward incrementality analysis and multi-touch attribution that answers persistent advertiser questions.
“If you are a consumer electronics advertiser, you want to come to Best Buy because of the data we have, the products and solutions that we offer,” Jensen said.
