By Stan Turek, General Manager, Measurement at InMarket
For too long, consumer packaged goods (CPG) brands have been told if return on ad spend is strong, media is working successfully. Then why are most brands living in a different reality as household penetration, repeat rates, and category growth remain flat? The Association of National Advertisers 2025 report found that $26.8 billion is wasted in programmatic spend each year due to inefficiency in media.
Much of this disconnect comes down to the fact that the most common KPI in the industry still rewards the wrong outcome, actively misleading brands while calling it success.
The truth is the entire CPG industry has fallen into a trap where growth appears on paper, but fails to translate into business revenue. Most CPG media is still optimized for conversions and standard return on ad spend (ROAS), not incrementality. In practice, that means brands are pouring budget into ads that reach people who were already likely to buy.
Platforms built to maximize conversions chase the easiest wins, gravitating toward high-intent, in-market audiences because they convert quickly. But it’s really just exploiting existing demand.
As pressure from finance teams heightens and costs are scrutinized, it’s impossible to defend spend with metrics that can’t distinguish between real demand creation and demand capture. Investments must be defended with proof. What brands need is a credible view of causal lift and incremental ROAS (iROAS) that shows what changed directly as a result of media.
Conversions Can Be Helpful, But Still Misleading
Conversion-led optimization assumes that a consumer purchased because of the ad. In reality, many of these high-intent consumers are already on the path to buy. When measurement is wired to conversion signals alone, platforms are biased towards finding the easiest converters – consumers who are in market – rather than whose behavior can actually be changed.
It’s a problematic model that reinforces itself: Attribution models reward last-touch signals. Results report well in dashboards. Brands get credited for hitting ROAS targets. All while the underlying behavior would have happened anyway.
The high ROAS metric ultimately creates a self-fulfilling loop of brands funding what performs best. In CPG, where brand penetration and habitual purchasing are already strong, this standard inflates performance reporting. As dollars flow toward already captured audiences, business growth erodes as a result of new buyer acquisition being underfunded, a costly misstep in a category where winning means expanding who buys your product.
The iROAS Standard: Measure What Changed, Not What Happened
Incrementality forces the question that most CPG measurement today ignores: What actually changed because of the media?
iROAS and sales lift bring the emphasis on causality back to the forefront. Not attributed activity, but real movement: incremental revenue, profit lift, and demand that wouldn’t have existed otherwise – the outcomes finance actually cares about.
That distinction becomes even more consequential in retail media networks (RMNs), where the perceived proximity to purchase often creates a false sense of value. However, just because a channel sits “closer to the transaction”, it doesn’t mean there’s a related cause and effect.
To understand the true value RMNs provide, measurement needs to do more than reward last-touch convenience. It needs to isolate what the media added.
From Retailer Silos to a Full Pantry View
Legacy CPG measurement was built for an era centered around grocery, but that world no longer exists. Today’s CPG brands need a full “pantry view” as shoppers move fluidly between Walmart, Target, Amazon, Costco, dollar, club, ecommerce, delivery, and other emerging channels – often within the same week.
This total market performance view shows you what happened at the retailer running the media, in addition to what happened across the rest of the ecosystem. Single-retailer silo readouts only show you where the sale happened, but not if any growth resulted.
Retailer-level reporting can be useful, but it can’t answer critical questions like:
- Did the campaign grow total brand demand, or just shift share between retailers?
- Are we gaining new households, or recycling existing buyers across channels?
- Which partners are driving incremental trips and baskets, not just attributed purchases?
Much of CPG measurement’s evolution has failed to keep pace, stuck in a single-retailer mindset while the consumer journey grows more fragmented. But this broader “pantry view” becomes foundational to incremental lift, which is then used in joint business planning and future RMN strategy.
In a World of Constant Exposure, Measurement Has to Evolve
For major CPG brands, truly unexposed audiences are rare. The average consumer encounters brand signals everywhere from browsing the shelves at the grocery store to ads while scrolling social media daily, all the way to streaming ads during the Big Game.
This is exactly where traditional exposed versus unexposed approaches break down. Clean control groups are difficult to maintain (in fact, finding unexposed individuals in the modern day is nearly impossible), and A/B-style designs can become fragile in the real world. As media fragments, measurement needs to rely on more resilient causal techniques, such as synthetic control approaches designed for a world where perfect control groups no longer exist.
This becomes a reliability factor, as brands need measurement that works week after week, across overlapping campaigns and always-on media, without collapsing under real-world complexity.
Incrementality At the End of Campaigns Is Just Postmortem
Incrementality is a major step in the right direction, but it’s only part of the solution. The real unlock is incremental results that surface fast enough to act on, not allowing underperforming strategies to turn into wasted budget.
When brands and agencies can see what’s driving lift while a campaign is still live, they can reallocate budget, cut what isn’t working, and scale what is — before it’s too late to matter. That combination of incrementality and in-flight optimization is what actually changes behavior.
As investment pours into alternative channels, this becomes critical. Not every channel behaves like classic media – and they shouldn’t be judged as if they do. Real-time, decision-grade measurement is the only way to know what works, while it still matters.
The New CPG Measurement Standard: How Brands Win in a World That Demands Proof
The era of convenient attribution is over. CFOs today are scrutinizing every single line item that crosses their desk. In a world of fragmented media and shrinking marketing budgets, CPG brands need measurement that earns authority to guide investment decisions. This starts with ditching vanity KPIs that inflate performance by over-crediting conversions that would have happened anyway.
Here are the non-negotiable pillars of effective CPG measurement that every marketer needs to drive performance that moves the needle:
- Incrementality-first KPIs, including iROAS and causal lift
- A full pantry view across retailers for total-market performance
- Reliable causal methodology suited for high-exposure brands
- In-flight optimization, not just retrospective reporting
Weekly iROAS that empowers marketers to optimize campaigns in-flight ultimately resets the incentive structure. It makes media accountable to growth in a time frame where decisions can still be made, elevating causal impact above convenient attribution.This isn’t just a playbook. It’s the new standard. The CPG winners will be those who can answer this single question: What did we grow that wouldn’t have happened otherwise?
If you can’t measure what changed, you can’t defend what you spent.
