There is a category of CPG brands right now that is quietly printing money on retail media while everyone else is fighting over Meta audiences and TikTok affiliates. They are not bigger brands. They are not smarter marketers. They just got into retail media earlier, understood the measurement properly, and built a network strategy that treats Amazon, Walmart, and Target as distinct platforms rather than interchangeable ad networks.
This is the breakdown of what retail media networks actually are, which ones matter for your category, what the real benchmarks look like, and the single measurement mistake that burns most CPG budgets before they ever see a return.
What Retail Media Networks Actually Are
A retail media network is an advertising platform run by a retailer. It lets you serve ads inside that retailer's digital and physical environment using their own first-party purchase data. Amazon Ads, Walmart Connect, Target Roundel, Kroger Precision Marketing, and Instacart Ads are the biggest players in the US, with 50+ networks now operating across major grocery, pharmacy, home improvement, and department store chains.
This matters because the data powering these networks is fundamentally different from what Meta or Google use. RMN audiences are built from actual purchase history, not inferred intent. When Walmart tells you an ad reached shoppers who bought in your category in the last 30 days, they mean it. That is a level of signal precision that social platforms cannot replicate post-iOS changes.
US retail media ad spending is growing 17.8% year-over-year in 2026, outpacing both social and search growth rates. Retail media now accounts for 25% of all digital advertising globally, at a projected $129 billion. CPG brands that have not built a retail media strategy are already behind the curve on where their category buyers are spending attention.
The Four Networks That Matter for CPG Brands
Not every network deserves your budget. Here is what each platform offers, who it works for, and the realistic performance benchmarks by category.
Amazon Ads (Sponsored Products + DSP)
Best for: Discovery and high-intent search
Amazon Sponsored Products are pay-per-click search ads that appear in results and on product detail pages. They are the foundation of any Amazon advertising strategy and the place every CPG brand should start. There is no minimum spend, the auction is mature and well-documented, and the intent signal is as close to bottom-of-funnel as it gets. Someone searching for 'magnesium glycinate 400mg' on Amazon is ready to buy.
ROAS benchmarks by category: Supplements and Vitamins 5-8x. Grocery and CPG 3-5x. Beauty and Skincare 4-7x. Health and Personal Care 5-8x on Sponsored Products. These benchmarks assume your listing is fully optimised, your images are conversion-tested, and your review count is competitive for the category. Without those foundations, the auction is expensive and inefficient.
Amazon DSP extends reach beyond Amazon itself using Amazon's purchase data across partner sites and apps. It requires a $10,000/month minimum and is best deployed once your Sponsored Products campaigns are stable and generating consistent ACOS. High-repeat-purchase categories including supplements, food, beverage, and personal care see the strongest DSP returns because the retargeting window is predictable. If your Sponsored infrastructure is not yet stable, DSP will amplify inefficiency, not fix it.
Walmart Connect
Best for: Mainstream CPG, grocery, health and beauty
Walmart Connect is the second-largest retail media network in the US, generating $4.4 billion in annual advertising revenue with 27% year-over-year growth. The reach is extraordinary: Walmart serves 265 million monthly shoppers and reaches an estimated 90% of US households, spanning Walmart.com, the Walmart app, in-store TV walls, self-checkout screens, and in-store radio.
The cost structure is meaningfully different from Amazon. Walmart CPCs run $0.40-$0.80 versus Amazon's $1.30-$1.50, a 60-70% discount for equivalent search intent. For Health and Beauty specifically, Walmart Connect delivers ROAS of 6.7-10x, the highest-performing vertical on the platform. The managed service threshold starts around $1,000/month, making it accessible for brands at earlier stages than Amazon DSP.
The critical difference between Walmart and Amazon shoppers is buying motivation. Amazon shoppers research and compare. Walmart shoppers stock up and repurchase. This makes Walmart Connect particularly effective for household staples, food and beverage, and personal care products where repeat purchase rate is the real value driver.
Target Roundel
Best for: Premium CPG, beauty, wellness, lifestyle
Target Roundel generates nearly $2 billion in annual value and is positioned as the premium retail media network, targeting higher-income demographics. Target shoppers over-index on wellness, premium food, and lifestyle categories, which makes Roundel particularly effective for better-for-you food brands, premium supplements, and prestige beauty.
Roundel operates differently from Amazon and Walmart. It is a managed-service network, meaning you work with Target's team rather than self-serve. This requires higher minimum commitments but gives you access to Target's loyalty card data covering purchase behaviour across their 32 million active Target Circle members.
The measurement gap that exists across most in-store retail media is less acute at Target because their Circle loyalty programme ties digital ad exposure directly to in-store purchase data. If your product is stocked in Target and your gross margin supports a premium placement, Roundel is worth the conversation.
Instacart Ads
Best for: Early-stage CPG brands entering grocery
Instacart is the easiest entry point to retail media for brands that are distributed in grocery but not yet on Amazon or in Walmart. You can start with as little as $500/month on their self-serve platform, which delivers clean purchase-intent targeting across the 1,400+ retailer partners on the Instacart network.
Instacart's measurement is also the most accessible: the platform tracks from ad impression directly through to completed grocery order, giving you clean attribution without the complexity of Amazon's multi-touchpoint auction. For brands early in their retail media journey, Instacart offers the best combination of low minimum spend and readable performance data.
The limitation is reach. Instacart shoppers represent a premium, convenience-oriented segment of grocery buyers, not the mass-market volume of Walmart or the research-led buyers of Amazon. Use Instacart to prove the retail media model, then scale investment into the larger networks as your distribution grows.
The Incrementality Mistake That Burns Most CPG Budgets
Here is the most expensive error I see CPG brands make on retail media: they optimise for platform-reported ROAS and call it a win. This is how brands spend $40,000 a month on Amazon Sponsored Products and genuinely believe they are generating 5x returns, when the real incremental return is 2x or less.
ROAS on retail media platforms is calculated using last-click attribution. It takes credit for any purchase that happened after an ad impression or click within the attribution window. The problem is that a large percentage of those purchases would have happened anyway. The shopper was already in-market for your product, already had brand familiarity, and was going to buy regardless of whether your Sponsored Product ad appeared. The platform counts that as an attributed sale. Your true incremental revenue from the ad was zero.
This is not a small rounding error. It is why 71% of retail media advertisers in 2026 rank incrementality as their number one KPI, above ROAS. Only 23% of retailers share data in real time, which compounds the problem: most brands are making optimisation decisions on data that is days old and structurally over-attributed.
The question is not what ROAS did my retail media generate. The question is how many of those sales would not have happened without the ad. That is incrementality. That is the number your budget decisions should be built on.
The practical fix is matched-market testing: run your campaign in a defined set of stores or geographies, hold back a comparable set as a control, and measure the difference in sales velocity. It is not fast and it is not cheap, but it is the only methodology that tells you what your retail media actually caused. Walmart Connect campaigns that qualify for formal sales lift studies show 2.8x stronger incremental ROAS than Circana digital media benchmarks, which is a compelling number but only meaningful once you are measuring incrementally rather than relationally.
How to Build Your RMN Strategy by Spend Level
Retail media strategy is not one-size-fits-all. The right entry point depends on where your product is distributed, what your budget allows, and whether your listing infrastructure can convert the traffic you are paying to send it.
Start with Amazon Sponsored Products or Instacart
At this budget, go deep on one network rather than spreading thin across three. If you sell on Amazon, Sponsored Products with tight keyword targeting and negative keyword management will give you the fastest feedback loop. If you are in grocery distribution, Instacart's $500/month minimum and clean attribution make it the right test bed. Master one platform before adding another.
Add Walmart Connect as a second network
Once your Amazon Sponsored campaigns are hitting consistent ACOS targets (under 25% in most CPG categories), begin testing Walmart Connect. The $0.40-$0.80 CPC environment is significantly cheaper than Amazon and the health and beauty vertical delivers some of the strongest ROAS benchmarks on any retail media network. Run campaigns separately on each platform with separate creative, separate KPIs, and separate measurement frameworks. They are not interchangeable.
Layer in Amazon DSP and evaluate Target Roundel
With $10,000/month available, Amazon DSP becomes viable if your Sponsored Products foundation is solid and your product is in a high-repeat-purchase category. DSP retargeting for supplements, food, beverage, and personal care brands performs strongest because the re-engagement window is predictable. At the same time, if your product is stocked in Target and your gross margin supports a premium placement, open the conversation with Target Roundel. Their Circle loyalty data is genuinely differentiated for wellness and premium food brands.
Measure incrementality from day one
Start small with incrementality testing even if your budget does not support a full matched-market study. At minimum, run a 30-day period where you advertise in one region and hold back another comparable region as a control. Compare sales velocity. The gap tells you whether your ads are causing purchases or just appearing alongside purchases that were going to happen anyway. Make this a recurring discipline, not a one-off exercise.
The One-Network-At-a-Time Rule
The most common strategic mistake I see beyond measurement is treating retail media networks as interchangeable. Teams build one campaign structure and replicate it across Amazon, Walmart, and Target as if the audiences, bidding dynamics, shopper intent, and creative requirements were the same.
They are not. Amazon shoppers research, compare, and make considered purchases. Walmart shoppers are stocking up on household staples and repurchasing trusted brands. Target shoppers are browsing, discovering, and buying premium. Each network deserves its own strategy, its own creative, its own KPIs, and its own budget line. A Walmart Connect campaign that treats Walmart shoppers as if they behave like Amazon shoppers will underperform consistently.
The brands that win on retail media are the ones that understand this distinction deeply. They have different product priorities on each platform. They have different promotional mechanics. They have different creative formats. And they measure success differently because the conversion event and the attribution window are not the same across networks.
What This Looks Like in Practice
I worked with a wellness supplements brand doing steady Amazon volume with a reported 4.8x Sponsored Products ROAS. They were proud of it and asked me whether they should add Amazon DSP at $10,000/month to scale. Before committing the budget, we ran a basic holdout test: we paused Sponsored Products in two low-competition categories for 30 days and compared sales velocity to the other categories where we kept the campaigns running.
The paused categories dropped by only 8% in sales. The categories with active ads stayed flat. The incremental contribution of those campaigns was roughly 8% of reported attributed revenue, which translated to a real incremental ROAS of approximately 1.8x, not 4.8x. The brand had been treating last-click attribution as proof of performance for 18 months.
We restructured the Sponsored Products campaigns around defensive keyword coverage for branded terms (where incrementality is genuinely high), cut non-branded broad match spend by 60%, redirected budget into Walmart Connect where their product category had almost no Sponsored Competition, and invested in Instacart to build incremental grocery distribution data.
Total retail media spend went down by 22%. Total incremental unit sales went up by 31%. The same budget, better directed, produced a fundamentally different outcome. That is what operator-level retail media strategy looks like.
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Book Your AuditFrequently asked questions
What is a retail media network?
A retail media network (RMN) is an advertising platform run by a retailer that lets brands serve ads inside that retailer's digital and physical environment using the retailer's own first-party shopper data. Amazon Ads, Walmart Connect, Target Roundel, and Instacart Ads are the largest. Because audiences are built from actual purchase data rather than inferred intent, retail media typically delivers higher conversion rates than social or display advertising.
Which retail media network should a CPG brand start with?
Most emerging CPG brands should start with Amazon Sponsored Products if they already sell on Amazon, or Instacart Ads if they are in grocery distribution. Amazon Sponsored Products have no minimum spend. Instacart starts at $500/month. Walmart Connect managed service begins around $1,000/month, and Amazon DSP requires $10,000/month minimum. Start where your product is already stocked and build from there.
What ROAS should CPG brands expect from Amazon Sponsored Products?
By category: Supplements and Vitamins 5-8x, Grocery and CPG 3-5x, Beauty and Skincare 4-7x. Retail media overall maintained a 6.1x ROAS for five consecutive quarters through early 2026. However, 71% of experienced retail media advertisers now prioritise incrementality over ROAS, because platform-reported figures include sales that would have happened without the ad.
How is Walmart Connect different from Amazon Ads?
Walmart Connect CPCs run 60-70% cheaper than Amazon ($0.40-$0.80 vs $1.30-$1.50). Walmart reaches 265 million monthly shoppers, skewing toward value-driven grocery buyers. Amazon reaches higher-income, research-led buyers with a more mature self-serve auction. Walmart delivers 2.8x stronger incremental ROAS than Circana digital media benchmarks in qualifying campaigns, making it particularly effective for mainstream CPG, household goods, and health and beauty.
What is incrementality in retail media and why does it matter?
Incrementality measures how many sales your ads actually caused versus sales that would have happened without the ad. Most RMN platforms report attributed ROAS using last-click models, which takes credit for purchases the shopper would have made regardless. A brand with 4x reported ROAS may have an incremental ROAS of 2x or less. Matched-market testing is the most reliable measurement method. This is why 71% of retail media advertisers in 2026 rank incrementality as their number one KPI.
When should a CPG brand use Amazon DSP?
Amazon DSP is the right next step once your Amazon Sponsored Products campaigns are stable with consistent ACOS, your listings are fully optimised, and you have at least $10,000/month budget. DSP performs best in high-repeat-purchase categories including supplements, food, beverage, and personal care. If your Sponsored infrastructure is not yet mature, DSP will amplify inefficiency rather than fix it.
About the author
Caner Veli built Liquiproof from zero to 3,000+ global retailers in under 6 years. He now helps DTC and CPG brands fix broken growth engines and scale 2x-15x in 90 days.