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 that incrementality, not just gross sales, is the new retail media benchmark, and CommerceIQ’s AllyAI was 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 drive true 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 AllyAI is built to optimize.
Every media dollar should move the needle. And with AllyAI, 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:
- A specialty snacks brand 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 brand scaled ad spend 5.5x while keeping iROAS above 4, proving you don’t have to sacrifice efficiency for scale.
- A packaged foods brand delivered nearly 4x in ad sales with only 7% more spend, thanks to precision budget reallocation to high-incrementality targets.
- A furniture brand relied on advertising to recapture organic softness, with ads generating over 30% of total revenue vs. just 10% last year.
- An auto care brand grew traffic by over 300% and ad sales by over 200%, with AllyAI dynamically optimizing bids based on real-time shelf and market signals.
Behind the wins: what AllyAI optimizes that others don’t
AllyAI 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.
AllyAI also responds in real time. While most models rely on outdated regression-based forecasts, AllyAI 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
These Prime Day results weren’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 your retail media strategy 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
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