In 2025, the struggle to balance online, retail, and marketplaces like Amazon is no longer about competition — it’s about integration — and cross-channel measurement is a top priority for all retail brands this year. Customers expect a seamless experience across physical stores, ecommerce platforms, mobile apps, and social commerce — but connecting customer data across all these interactions is a major hurdle for even the savviest marketers.
The challenge is distinguishing between customers who would have purchased anyway and those influenced by an ad campaign – at a time when traditional attribution models often overstate the impact of digital ads, leading to wasted spending.
Since online, in-store and marketplace behaviors vary significantly across regions, one-size-fits-all marketing strategies often fall short and retailers risk overspending in areas where ads don’t drive incremental sales. This is especially true when it comes to mapping incremental sales data across all channels, including the biggest of them all: Amazon.
As enterprise brands continue to expand their omnichannel footprint, sales on marketplaces like Amazon, and others have become an increasingly important revenue driver. It’s important for brands to test and measure Amazon. You may be surprised by the results.
That said, accessing and integrating Amazon and retail data to measure incrementality testing is one of the biggest challenges that Measured sees across our portfolio of ecommerce clients.
The Amazon Sales Data Challenge
Amazon is indisputably the top ecommerce retailer in the U.S., and according to eMarketer, it has far surpassed the combined ad sales power of Google and Meta. In 2024, Amazon accounted for 40% of U.S. ecommerce sales and 4% of retail sales, and in 2025, Amazon is projected to grow its U.S. retail ecommerce sales to $491.65 billion.
The drawback is that Amazon lacks robust, built-in incrementality testing tools for most retailers, requiring them to rely on external methods like geo-testing, holdout groups, or third-party analytics platforms.
Here are a few of the key challenges when it comes to Amazon sales data for media measurement:
- Attribution Complexity – Amazon’s “Walled Garden” limits transparency into how different marketing channels contribute to conversions. Without clear visibility, retailers and measurement partners can’t isolate the impact of specific ad campaigns or promotional efforts.
- Delayed & Aggregated Reporting – Amazon sometimes reports data with lags and in aggregate, making it difficult for brands to run real-time tests or align its reporting with external marketing data for accurate incrementality measurement.
- Multi-Touchpoint Interference – Many Amazon purchases are influenced by multiple touchpoints (e.g., external ads, Amazon search, deals), making it hard to separate true incremental impact from existing demand.
- Restricted Customer Data – Amazon controls customer relationships, withholding key information like email addresses and demographic details, limiting direct marketing opportunities for brands.
- Complex Reporting Tools – Amazon’s reporting dashboards (e.g., Amazon Seller Central, Amazon Brand Analytics) can be difficult to navigate, requiring manual effort to extract and analyze meaningful insights
- Paywalls for Advanced Insights – Some valuable analytics, like detailed competitor benchmarking and granular customer behavior trends, require sellers to pay for premium services or use third-party tools.
Because of these barriers, it’s difficult for brands to access this data on their own and they often require the technical capabilities of a dedicated measurement partner to access and clean the data so it’s usable for measurement.
Measured Closes the Data Gap
To solve for this marketer measurement challenge, we recently announced incrementality testing and insights capabilities for Amazon and retail. As part of a select group, Measured now offers its brands the ability to analyze the incremental impact — and the halo effect — of their media spend on Amazon and retail.
On average, we've found that for every 1% of incrementally driven media to ecommerce channels, at least an additional .5% of that sales volume is driven to Amazon. In many cases, the total volume being driven via Amazon is actually higher than the direct impact.
The future of Amazon and retail isn’t about choosing between online and brick-and-mortar, or marketplaces — it’s about making them all work together. Brands that invest in smart measurement tools, real-time data integration, and AI-driven personalization will be best positioned to thrive in the evolving retail landscape.
Measured helps brands grow by revealing paid media’s incremental contribution to business outcomes and providing source-of-truth reporting for media investment decisions. To find out more about our data partnership with Amazon and how it can benefit your brand, reach out to a Measured expert today.