Beyond walled gardens: one view to maximize retail media performance

Retail media networks (RMNs) have always been comfortable playing on their home turf: leveraging owned channels, enjoying reliable visibility, and delivering consistent outcomes. 

But expanding their reach to offsite platforms has often felt like venturing into uncertain terrain filled with unknowns. Fragmented measurement, unclear attribution, and limited visibility into performance are real barriers that marketers frequently face.

Yet, offsite is where the biggest growth opportunities lie. Brands want broader reach, precise targeting, and measurable results, which offsite platforms clearly offer. So why haven’t more RMNs jumped in?

The problem isn’t ambition, it’s clarity in measurement

Marketers face several measurement challenges when dealing with multiple platforms. Data often arrives fragmented, leading to manual consolidation that’s tricky and error-prone. It can be difficult to pinpoint exactly which engagement triggered a conversion, resulting in uncertainty. There’s also the risk of double-counting conversions across channels, inflating numbers and causing confusion. 

Here’s a scenario many retail media networks face:

A leading retail marketplace offers brands a managed media package that includes onsite ads, social activation via Meta, and campaigns on the open web. About 60% of conversions happen on mobile and 40% on the web. Brands want a clear view of their campaign performance to optimize spending effectively, but reality is different.

Currently, each media source provides separate reports, forcing brands to dedicate significant engineering resources to merge fragmented data. Without a unified view, optimization relies heavily on guesswork.

A new way forward: Consolidation and clarity

To address these challenges, AppsFlyer developed a measurement capability within its Data Collaboration Platform (DCP), integrating both mobile and web performance data from Meta and Google. This provides a cohesive dashboard that merges onsite and offsite campaign data.

A key part of this unified view is deduplication. AppsFlyer uses its access to user-level engagement data from walled gardens through MMP integrations and from onsite environments—to deliver last-touch mobile conversion attribution that’s already deduplicated across onsite and offsite channels.

On top of that, DCP brings in web conversions and applies a simple rule: only share them with Meta or Google if the click ID is tied to an active campaign, and if its timestamp is the closest one to the conversion. This validation happens across both onsite and offsite sources, so each conversion is shared just once. That way, even measurement coming back from the platforms themselves is clean and deduplicated.

DCP then brings everything together into a single view — across channels and platforms.

Confidence to expand offsite

With clear insights, RMNs have a straightforward view of their campaign performance, making optimization and decision-making simpler. Better measurement means retail media networks can confidently expand their offsite marketing efforts. Clear visibility across mobile and web channels, accurate attribution, and user-friendly dashboards remove uncertainty, providing marketers with simple, actionable insights.

Stepping into offsite territory no longer means uncertainty. Clear measurement is finally within reach, helping retail media networks fully use the potential of offsite advertising.

Key takeaways

Looking to expand into offsite while keeping visibility and performance top of mind? Start here:

• Give your partners one version of the truth
  A unified view across onsite and offsite, mobile and web, helps eliminate reporting gaps and confusion.
• Make duplication a thing of the past
  Smart deduplication logic ensures each conversion is counted once—so everyone’s working with clean, trusted data.
• Simplify what used to take engineering hours
  No more stitching together reports from Meta, Google, and your own platform. Let your team focus on insights, not integration.
• Measure what matters, wherever it happens
  Whether a conversion happens onsite or offsite, on web or in-app, you’ll have the full picture—ready to act on.