Prime Day rewritten: measuring what really matters
Retail media success has long been measured by surface metrics, such as click-through rates, return on ad spend (ROAS), and attributed sales. But the brands winning today aren’t chasing clicks. They’re chasing impact. This Prime Day, several national brands proved thatincrementality, not just gross sales, is the new retail media benchmark, andCommerceIQ’s AllyAIwas the engine behind that shift, driving performance by optimizing for incrementality.
Across diverse categories, such as Furniture, Grocery, and more, CommerceIQ delivered more than impressive topline numbers. We delivered incremental growth that mattered.
Rethinking ROI: from ad spend to incremental sales
Too often, brands pour dollars into campaigns that look successful on paper but fail to drivetrue net-new revenue. ROAS inflates results by counting sales that would have happened anyway. Incrementality isolates the impact of media spend that actually drives additional purchases, and that’s what AllyAIis built to optimize.
Every media dollar should move the needle. And with Ally AI , it does.
What incrementality looked like this Prime Day
Here’s what happened when national brands traded traditional automation rules for real-time, AI-driven incrementality optimization:
- specialty snacks brandA saw iROAS jump from just over 0.5 to nearly 1.5, doubling media efficiency and driving over a 50% increase in ordered product sales.
- A drinkware brandscaled ad spend 5.5x while keeping iROAS above 4, proving you don’t have to sacrifice efficiency for scale.
- A packaged foods branddelivered nearly 4x in ad sales with only 7% more spend, thanks to precision budget reallocation to high-incrementality targets.
- A furniture brandrelied on advertising to recapture organic softness, with ads generating over 30% of total revenue vs. just 10% last year.
- An auto care brandgrew traffic by over 300% and ad sales by over 200%, with Ally AI dynamically optimizing bids based on real-time shelf and market signals.
Behind the wins: what AllyAIoptimizes that others don’t
Ally AI doesn’t guess, it calculates. It factors in over 50 variables including:
- Share of voice
- SKU and keyword attributes
- Inventory and Buy Box signals
- Competitive pressure
- Propensity to convert
More importantly, it works at the target level, not the campaign level, ensuring every bid is designed to generate incremental results, not vanity metrics.
Ally AI also responds in real time. While most models rely on outdated regression-based forecasts, Ally AI recalibrates multiple times daily using intra-day shelf and ad performance data. That means you’re not just optimized: you’re always optimized.
Incrementality is the future of retail media
ThesePrime Day resultsweren’t anomalies. They were outcomes of a smarter model built to challenge conventional KPIs and drive what really matters:incremental growth. CommerceIQ has redefined how brands measure success by building incrementality into the core of campaign optimization.
If yourretail mediastrategy still starts and ends with ROAS, it’s time to level up.
Ready to optimize for outcomes, not optics? Talk to us about driving incrementality.Request a demo
