Proving that an ad actually moved the needle – rather than just touched a customer who was already buying – has become a central challenge for retail media networks.
Best Buy Ads is betting that a layered measurement approach, combining geo-based incrementality testing with SKU-level attribution and marketing mix modeling, will give advertisers the confidence they need to keep spending. The electronics retailer says it now treats incrementality not as an optional study but as a default feature baked into every campaign.
“What we’re trying to do at Best Buy Ads is build incrementality into all of our measurement,” said Stephen Sheron, senior director of ads analytics at Best Buy Ads, in this video interview with Beet.TV.
In-store media as a full-funnel play
Best Buy introduced “takeover packages” in September 2025, allowing brands to dominate store environments through window displays, entrance signage, TV walls and interactive screens.
“When brands invest in in-store media, it’s more than just a placement. It’s a holistic customer journey,” he said. “We’re trying to help our advertisers understand not only are their executions in our stores working, but how are they really tapping into the power of our 200 million-plus platform to build contextual audiences, to build predictive audiences, drive people to the store, ensure that awareness is accounted for, and then also, we’re driving purchase to hit that bottom line ROAS.”
The emphasis on journey-based thinking reflects a broader industry shift. Emarketer projects U.S. omnichannel retail media ad spending will reach $71.67 billion in 2026, a 17.9% year-over-year increase, as retailers restructure media teams to align digital and physical touchpoints more tightly.
Geo-based testing meets SKU-level accuracy
Sheron described a measurement stack that spans on-site, off-site, endemic and non-endemic campaigns, as well as in-store activations. For physical retail, the company relies on geo-based incrementality studies that isolate store-level effects.
“We’ve designed incrementality capabilities and have been rolling out our product to be able to support those efforts for both geo-based approaches, so that our advertisers can understand how they’re driving people to the store, how those stores are driving purchases as the bottom line ROAS, but then also what’s the incrementality associated with that?” he said.
Best-in-class reporting, in his view, comes down to three qualities. “I think best-in-class reporting is SKU-level. It’s accurate, and it’s actionable,” Sheron said. “At the end of the day, if we don’t have the actionability and our advertisers don’t trust the data behind it, then they’re not going to be able to make informed business decisions.”
Calibrating attribution with MMM and MTA
But Deterministic attribution alone leaves gaps, Sheron acknowledged. Best Buy Ads fills them by layering incrementality testing on top of performance data and then feeding results into marketing mix models and multi-touch attribution frameworks.
“We use incrementality testing to validate and calibrate our performance,” he said. “And then also we lean into a vendor-level MMM and multi-touch attribution methodologies to further round out the learnings for our advertisers.”
Sheron argued that the retailers able to prove omnichannel impact will be those that connect upper-funnel awareness to lower-funnel conversion in a single measurement story.
You’re watching coverage from IAB Connected Commerce Summit 2026. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.
