“Shopper journeys are very complex, and retail media networks (RMNs) need scale to reach those shoppers, wherever they may be,” said Shawn McGahee, head of retail media at Google, during last week’s EMARKETER Summit on commerce media.

• That’s why RMNs have begun to offer off-site inventory that enables advertisers to more effectively target consumers across the web and achieve better results.
• “We’re seeing off-site being a great channel to help drive improved incremental sales in retail media,” said McGahee.

Google is playing a major role in this off-site evolution, given its footprint across search, YouTube, Maps, and the open web.

“There’s searching behavior that’s in most every shopper journey. There’s scrolling behavior, there’s streaming, and then there’s shopping,” said McGahee.

Google is leveraging this knowledge to embed retail ads naturally across its properties.

• For example, off-site ads are complementing sponsored products in Google Search and Shopping.
• Other ads target scrollers on Google Discover and YouTube Shorts, while connected TV (CTV) viewers can now see retail media ads thanks to new integrations with Google's Display & Video 360.
• “We’re really leaning into what we know about customer behaviors,” said McGahee.

As the company expands further into retail media, Google remains purposeful around the products it develops, focusing on three key areas.

• Performance. “There’s a growing demand for media that actually performs,” said McGahee. “We’re seeing a disconnect between the ROAS that’s being reported and the conversations that advertisers are having with the merchandising side of retail [where the results] aren’t as favorable as the retail media report is.”
• Fragmentation. The average brand buys across six to 11 RMNs, each of which works with five to 10 ad tech platforms, according to McGahee. “We can’t get to the next level of scale with that much fragmentation,” he said.
• Measurement. “The great value of RMNs is their measurement,” said McGahee. “But the thing that is most challenging for them is also measurement.”

While every retailer can’t match the scale of Walmart or Amazon, there’s still plenty of opportunities for them to succeed.

“You can’t take the big guys’ playbook and just copy and paste it to your business,” said McGahee, advising smaller networks to lean into their unique assets—like in-store availability—and focus on outperforming competitors with stronger incrementality and merchandising results.

“We really just lean into helping the networks... competing with performance,” McGahee said. As the landscape matures, he predicts a divergence from a one-size-fits-all launch playbook, toward “really unique cohorts.”

Google is also working to help advertisers adjust their campaigns in real-time. By using Google’s infrastructure, advertisers can identify what’s working mid-campaign and adjust bids accordingly.

• “There is a big opportunity in real-time bidding and optimization,” said McGahee.“We think that there’ll be more activations in that space to not just report and it’s stagnant, but leverage the data in a more real-time manner to drive results.”

For RMNs with a physical footprint, Google can help create a seamless integration between the online and offline world.

• “We work with retailers to use their product feeds to identify what type of in-store offerings they may have,” said McGahee.
• These local inventory ads can trigger Google Maps placements, driving foot traffic and in-store sales.
• To fully activate this, retailers need clean product feeds and the ability to upload offline sales data for attribution, according to McGahee. “As we see in-store attribution become a larger part of this industry, the need for that is only going to grow,” he said.

Watch the full session.

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