Reach New Customers by Diversifying your Retail Media Footprint
You’ve got a good thing going with your Amazon advertising. A lot of your products have high visibility, positive reviews, and healthy sales. But you worry you may have hit Peak Amazon, because your Retail Media performance has plateaued.
If your Amazon advertising has plateaued, the retail media landscape now offers real alternatives, and they’ve matured enough to deliver serious growth. Walmart Connect, Target Roundel, and Best Buy Ads each reach distinct audiences Amazon doesn’t own, but expanding successfully means more than opening your budget to a new platform.
At ROI Revolution, we’ve seen expanding beyond Amazon to be a huge growth opportunity. With one client, two months after beginning our support and strategy for their Target advertising, we saw 10x the revenue from Target ad sales, and their overall Target sales increased by 30%.
Which Retail Media Networks Come After Amazon?
An advertising platform owned and operated by a retailer, a retail media network (RMN) uses its own customer shopping data to help brands reach buyers at or near the point of purchase. Unlike traditional digital advertising, RMNs offer closed-loop measurement, meaning the retailer can connect an ad exposure directly to a sale, including in-store purchases.
Walmart and Target are the biggest “next step” RMN’s after Amazon. Walmart Connect has seen explosive growth, and EMARKETER forecasts that Walmart and Amazon combined will capture 89% of incremental retail media spend in 2026. Walmart makes it easy to track sales attribution across the customer journey, from connected TV to online marketplace to brick-and-mortar stores, thanks to its full-funnel touchpoints. Target has a more affluent, loyal customer base with the ability to target precisely, and is usually listed third behind Amazon and Walmart in terms of market share and growth opportunities.
But there are more contenders for your retail media advertising expansion. Other retailers have joined the game and are quickly growing their online marketplaces. These upstarts include Home Depot (Orange Apron Media), Lowe’s One Roof Media Network, Best Buy Ads, and Kroger Precision Marketing. Criteo Commerce Media’s advertising platform also unlocks other major retailers, including Macy’s, Albertsons, Bloomindales, CVS, Costco, Nordstrom, and Ulta.
Which RMN Is Right for Your Brand?
If you’re not sure which platforms are the best fit for your brand, here’s a handy rule of thumb: imagine that you’re wandering the aisles of a retailer’s physical location and see your products on the shelves. Do they fit in? The answer to this question can be “yes” even if you sell exclusively online. Each marketplace has a unique customer base. For example, industry KPI data shows that Amazon leads in discretionary spending, while Walmart commands the market for essentials like groceries and household goods.
You may even need to tailor your product mix to each platform. If you sell home goods, Target Roundel is a great place to advertise patio chair cushions and kitchen and dining room furniture. On Home Depot, you’d focus your ad budget on outdoor furniture and DIY products.
What It Really Takes to Launch on a New RMN
- Enough budget to scale: To build your brand presence and visibility on a new retail media network, you must commit to a strong initial investment. Starting out with a tiny testing budget will not yield the kind of growth we’ve seen with brands. If there are already brands selling and advertising in the category, a larger dedicated launch budget is necessary to build initial traffic and conversions for your products. This will improve your product rankings as sales grow and give you the necessary data to make strategic decisions going forward.
- Team bandwidth: Expanding to other marketplaces also requires time. You can’t just copy your Amazon setup to the new platforms (see Common Mistakes below!). If you’re only advertising on Amazon and you want to expand to Target Roundel, you need to plan for roughly doubling the hours your team currently spends managing Amazon Ads.
- Knowledge of the platforms: You’ll need to research the different capabilities of each platform. For example, Target Roundel has few search capabilities but strong display networks. It’s important to understand how sales are measured, what kind of targeting is being utilized, and how the targeting works.
Common Mistakes When Expanding Beyond Amazon
- Don’t set up a carbon copy of your Amazon strategy. The “everything store” is the gold standard for retail media, but every other RMN is different in terms of capabilities of ad types, requirements for images, copy, and allowed products. Because of these nuances, you likely will need to adapt your creative and strategies to fit the platform.
- Don’t stall your growth with auto campaigns. Many brands start by setting up auto campaigns on new platforms and leave it there. You need to get granular with analysis. Look at your top converting search terms and keywords and your ad performance for them. You can then make adjustments based on your analysis. Even introducing differentiated product bids (where a campaign can make a category bid and then different bids for individual products) can have huge results.
Tips for Long-Term Retail Media Success
- Prep for Peak Season: If your brand has seasonality, you want your new retail media programs to be optimized in time for the high season. To achieve this, start your new or increased ad initiatives at least 90 days ahead of your peak season. This lead-up time gives the platform’s algorithm time to learn from your campaigns, your products time to accumulate reviews, and your team time to test and optimize before you need peak performance.
- Be conscious of reviews: One of your top products might have hundreds of 5-star reviews on Amazon and only one on Roundel. Reviews don’t transfer between platforms, so your star rating effectively resets when you launch somewhere new. As a rule of thumb, don’t send paid traffic to a product with fewer than 10 reviews on the new platform; low review counts suppress conversion rates and waste budget.
Get Started Growing Your Retail Media Footprint
Scaling your ad spend on retail media networks has a tangible effect: significantly increased visibility for your products and for a wider range of your products, which leads to more eyes on your offerings and a substantial increase in revenue.
Growing your retail media footprint isn’t just a budget decision, it’s a bandwidth and expertise decision. The brands winning on Walmart Connect, Target Roundel, and Kroger Precision Marketing aren’t just spending more. They’re spending smarter, on platforms they understand deeply. That takes time, expertise, and bandwidth that most in-house teams are already stretching. If you’ve read this far and the opportunity feels real but the capacity doesn’t, working with an agency partner isn’t admitting defeat. It’s how the best brands scale.
At ROI Revolution, we understand the customers on each platform and know what has worked for our clients. Before scaling on a new RMN, we identify the products with highest potential for growth, inventory, and margin. Our team conducts deep analysis of search query and page type performance, which allows us to identify initial trends and scale in the right areas. If you’re ready to grow your retail media program with expert support, contact us.
ICYMI: Other Retail Media Blog Posts
How to Use AI for Advertising: Best Practices for Retail Media & Paid Search
How a Tech Giant Achieved a 14x ROAS on Amazon with a Full-Funnel Brand Strategy
