Retail media is expected to be a $62 billion pie per Emarketer, and Meta is quietly angling for a chunk of it.
Over the past year, the tech giant has been sharing more data, rolling out new products, and updating old ones, all geared at retailers, eight sources told ADWEEK.
Meta is doing this as retail media sellers are building tools that let them place ads off their owned-and-operated sites, said Sammy Rubin, vp of integrated media at Wpromote. Many sellers are now buying ads on CTV platforms like Roku. If Meta doesn’t step up its retail media offering, it risks losing out on attracting those dollars, multiple sources said.
Meta is helping prove that retail media ads worked
One of Meta’s most significant new products is an API that allows online marketplaces that sell products from third parties to run ads on Meta, multiple sources told ADWEEK. Most importantly, the API collects data that lets both the marketplace and brand know whether those ads drove sales.
In a hypothetical example, if DeWalt buys an ad that appears on Meta to get people to buy a drill at Home Depot, now Meta’s API will let both DeWalt and Home Depot know if that ad resulted in a sale, said James Avery, CEO and founder of Kevel.
While Meta launched the API in 2021, it was initially only available to marketplaces with at least 20,000 unique sellers—a high threshold for nascent retail media networks. Meta dropped the 20,000 requirement in 2024.
Marketers say Meta needs to staff up
There are two other recent examples of how Meta is jockeying for a larger piece of retail media.
Last spring, Meta started sharing product-level reporting with advertisers that lets retailers match SKU-level data back to sales, helping them to track which ads worked.
Meta has also begun sharing “impression logs” with at least two retailers, which use Meta ad impression data to help retail media networks track how Meta users interact with ads and whether they lead to the sales of individual products. One source at a retail media firm told ADWEEK that two of its retailer clients have been given “hands-on access” to these impression logs for the first time from Meta, with two more in talks for access.
