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Retail media measurement: How to get it right
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Marketing budgets are rising across the board, with the Q3 2026 IPA Bellwether Report showing a net 14.3% of UK companies revising their budgets upwards, the strongest reading in nine quarters. One reasonable reading is that part of this extra investment is marketers spending more to hold their position as the cost of advertising, and of winning each new customer, keeps climbing.
That makes the Golden Quarter harder to plan, because shoppers are not necessarily on the same timetable as the budgets chasing them. Our Advertising Under Pressure research found that 63% of UK consumers are putting off bigger purchases, which suggests a fair amount of the demand created by this season's media will be spent later rather than in November.
Black Friday has the strongest conversion ratio in our research at 50%, which is the share of people aware of a retail moment who were then influenced to buy at it. Boxing Day sits at 37% and the January sales at 34%, so conversion remains strong well after the main event has passed. Black Friday is also where marketer activity concentrates most heavily and where competition for attention pushes cost up, while the later moments attract a much smaller share of campaign investment.
When you pair those ratios with consumers who are deferring purchases, a plan that stops in the third week of December starts to look expensive for what it leaves behind. Some shoppers will wait out a crowded Black Friday, some will wait for the December pay packet, and some will wait for January's.
The gifting pattern adds to this, because for several weeks of the season the same person may browse unfamiliar categories and buy for parents, partners or children. As Esme Robinson argued in The Drum, treating those festive signals as lasting preferences risks carrying December's assumptions into January, when self-purchase and personal reward return.
That change in who the shopper is buying for also changes what your media is being asked to do. Through November and much of December, a large share of spend goes on reaching people who have never visited or bought from you, which tends to be the costliest job in the plan. From Boxing Day onwards, reactivating lapsed shoppers becomes a more realistic use of the same budget, and costs in some channels ease as competitors step back.
A global premium fashion brand running offsite display through John Lewis gives a useful picture of how this works in practice. Of its orders, 42% came from lapsed buyers who had not purchased in over 12 months.
The audience was seeded from the brand's best buyers, using John Lewis purchase behaviour and lookalike modelling to find new and lapsed prospects with a genuine propensity to buy, while existing customers were recognised and excluded where appropriate.
Importantly, a lapsed shopper has, almost by definition, stopped visiting. They are no longer browsing the retailer's site or app, so onsite media has little chance of reaching them, and the audience has to be found in the places where they now spend their time online, which can include a connected TV screen in the evening as much as a phone.
Identity is what makes that possible.
Matching on deterministic signals such as name and address lets the same person be recognised across devices and environments.
Recognising the person also helps once the campaign is running, because you can see who was actually moved by the advertising and what they did next, rather than relying on clicks alone. That in turn lets you coordinate the follow-up, with a different message for someone who has just been reactivated than for someone who has seen the ad but not yet returned.
It is a large part of why reactivation tends to work well in January, when the shopper is buying for themselves again and you already know something about what they like.
The marketers in our research are very focused on performance at the moment, which is understandable when quarterly targets are tight.
But it leaves little room for the shoppers who are not ready to buy yet, and a stronger start to 2027 depends on groundwork laid now. That means setting campaign goals for this quarter that reward awareness and consideration alongside sales.
Esme made the same point in her article, noting that immediate sales, stronger consideration and later incremental purchases cannot sensibly be judged against the same conversion metric.
Those goals only hold together when your channels are connected through identity, so that activity in one place can be linked to what people do elsewhere. That could be a lift in footfall, a change in brand consideration or more visits to your site. Without that link, an October consideration campaign will look as though it achieved nothing, and the January sale it helped create will be credited to whichever ad came last.
The full findings, including the conversion ratio for every retail moment across the Golden Quarter, are in the Advertising Under Pressure report.
Alongside the seasonal findings above, the report covers where UK consumers are discovering brands and how far that sits from where marketers are spending, how openness to switching differs by category, and a five point action plan for the £17.9bn UK consumers expect to spend across the season.
