PayPal Ads Bets on Transaction Data to Solve Commerce Media’s Measurement Problem
CANNES, France — While ad spending in commerce media is projected to reach $100 billion by 2026, according to Emarketer, proving true return on investment across multiple merchants remains elusive for many advertisers.
PayPal believes its position straddling 400 million users and 30 million merchants gives it an unusual vantage point. The company’s advertising arm, launched in May 2026, claims it can show advertisers what happens after a campaign runs – not just on one retailer’s site, but across the entire merchant landscape.
“We can show after someone was exposed to a CTV campaign, what happened at any merchant,” said Mark Grether, svp and gm of PayPal Ads, in this video interview with Beet.TV at Cannes Lions 2026. “That’s why we can provide a much richer, closed-loop attribution.”
Deterministic data versus proxies
The measurement challenge in commerce media stems partly from fragmented identity solutions. Most retail media networks can only track conversions on their own properties, leaving advertisers to guess at the broader impact of their campaigns.
Grether argued that PayPal’s payment infrastructure solves this fundamental problem. “We truly know who you are because we’re leveraging the payment rails,” he said. “And that is actually key from a measurement and incrementality perspective, because we can do it based on deterministic data as opposed to just proxies or look-alike modeling.”
The company combines transaction data from PayPal, Venmo peer-to-peer payments, and Honey browser activity to build its advertising offering.
Positioning as partner, not competitor
Rather than competing directly with retail media networks, PayPal Ads is pitching itself as connecting with existing merchant advertising operations. The company has struck partnerships with retailers including Best Buy and Sephora to extend their capabilities.
“We see us more as an amplifier, as an enabler, as opposed to a competitor,” Grether said. “It could be from an insights perspective, it could be from a measurement perspective, it could be from a media perspective.”
This approach addresses what Grether described as the two most fundamental questions for advertisers: “What is my market share across all the merchants? What can I do to actually increase my market share? And then secondly, where should I deploy my spending across these merchants? Where do I get the most incremental return?”
AI reshaping the customer journey
Artificial intelligence is transforming how consumers discover products, according to Grether, with implications for where advertisers need to show up. He pointed to PayPal’s data showing a shift in shopping behavior away from traditional search.
“Consumers are no longer starting their customer journey on search. They start in LLMs,” he said. “Eventually, they go to merchants and make the transactions, but they quite often actually skipped the search step in between.”
To address this shift, PayPal has developed what it calls storefront ads – shoppable units that bring a merchant’s store to consumers wherever they are browsing. “It might be on the open web, it might be in LLMs,” Grether explained. “And that gives the merchants the reach that they otherwise would eventually miss out.”
CANNES, France — While ad spending in commerce media is projected to reach $100 billion by 2026, according to Emarketer, proving true return on investment across multiple merchants remains elusive for many advertisers.
PayPal believes its position straddling 400 million users and 30 million merchants gives it an unusual vantage point. The company’s advertising arm, launched in May 2026, claims it can show advertisers what happens after a campaign runs – not just on one retailer’s site, but across the entire merchant landscape.
“We can show after someone was exposed to a CTV campaign, what happened at any merchant,” said Mark Grether, svp and gm of PayPal Ads, in this video interview with Beet.TV at Cannes Lions 2026. “That’s why we can provide a much richer, closed-loop attribution.”
Deterministic data versus proxies
The measurement challenge in commerce media stems partly from fragmented identity solutions. Most retail media networks can only track conversions on their own properties, leaving advertisers to guess at the broader impact of their campaigns.
Grether argued that PayPal’s payment infrastructure solves this fundamental problem. “We truly know who you are because we’re leveraging the payment rails,” he said. “And that is actually key from a measurement and incrementality perspective, because we can do it based on deterministic data as opposed to just proxies or look-alike modeling.”
The company combines transaction data from PayPal, Venmo peer-to-peer payments, and Honey browser activity to build its advertising offering.
Positioning as partner, not competitor
Rather than competing directly with retail media networks, PayPal Ads is pitching itself as connecting with existing merchant advertising operations. The company has struck partnerships with retailers including Best Buy and Sephora to extend their capabilities.
“We see us more as an amplifier, as an enabler, as opposed to a competitor,” Grether said. “It could be from an insights perspective, it could be from a measurement perspective, it could be from a media perspective.”
This approach addresses what Grether described as the two most fundamental questions for advertisers: “What is my market share across all the merchants? What can I do to actually increase my market share? And then secondly, where should I deploy my spending across these merchants? Where do I get the most incremental return?”
AI reshaping the customer journey
Artificial intelligence is transforming how consumers discover products, according to Grether, with implications for where advertisers need to show up. He pointed to PayPal’s data showing a shift in shopping behavior away from traditional search.
“Consumers are no longer starting their customer journey on search. They start in LLMs,” he said. “Eventually, they go to merchants and make the transactions, but they quite often actually skipped the search step in between.”
To address this shift, PayPal has developed what it calls storefront ads – shoppable units that bring a merchant’s store to consumers wherever they are browsing. “It might be on the open web, it might be in LLMs,” Grether explained. “And that gives the merchants the reach that they otherwise would eventually miss out.”
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