How to choose a retail media analytics tool

Retail media — ads sold by a retailer on its own site, app and in-store, using the retailer's own shopper data — is one of the fastest-growing categories in digital advertising, and the tooling splits cleanly along one line: are you the retailer selling the ad inventory, or the brand buying it? Almost every tool on this page is built for one side only, and a brand evaluating a sell-side platform (or vice versa) will waste an entire sales cycle before discovering the mismatch.

Sell-side versus buy-side

Epsilon Retail Media (CitrusAd) is the outlier in this category: it's infrastructure for the retailer, not the advertiser. It gives a retailer the ad server, self-service advertiser portal and reporting to run its own sponsored-product network — the vendor states over 70 retailers and distributors use it to run their ad businesses, with thousands of brands buying through it. If you're a retailer or marketplace considering building a retail media business, CitrusAd is the kind of platform to evaluate; if you're a brand trying to buy ads, it's not what you buy directly — it's often one of the underlying networks a buy-side tool connects to.

Everything else here — CommerceIQ, Criteo, Pacvue, Perpetua, Skai and Teikametrics — is buy-side: tools a brand or agency uses to manage bids, budgets and reporting for ads it's buying on retailers' networks (Amazon, Walmart, Instacart and others).

Retailer coverage decides more than features do

Within buy-side tools, the deciding factor is usually which retailers each platform actually covers, because campaigns you can't run on a given network are a moot feature comparison.

• Broad, cross-retailer coverage. Pacvue and Skai both cover 100+ retail media networks — Amazon, Walmart Connect, Target, Instacart, Kroger, Sam's Club and more — plus extensions into DSPs and social. Skai spans further into traditional search and social advertising alongside retail media, useful if you want one optimization engine across all of it rather than a retail-media-only view.
• Amazon-and-Walmart-only, priced transparently. Perpetua and Teikametrics are narrower by retailer — Perpetua is built primarily around Amazon (its own materials describe Amazon-focused capability; confirm current Walmart or Instacart coverage before assuming parity with Pacvue or Skai), Teikametrics explicitly supports Amazon and Walmart. Both are unusual in this category for publishing actual tiered prices rather than routing everyone to a quote.
• Mid-size and regional retailers outside Amazon and Walmart. Criteo connects to 225+ retailer partners but explicitly does not sell inventory on Amazon or Walmart's own ad stacks — those two run proprietary platforms Criteo doesn't have access to, so a brand selling primarily through Amazon needs separate tooling regardless of Criteo's other strengths.
• Ad bidding plus operations. CommerceIQ goes beyond bid management to tie ad performance to digital shelf health — search rank, availability, pricing — and automated content compliance across roughly 1,450 retail endpoints, useful if the actual constraint on ad performance is out-of-stock or non-compliant product listings rather than bid strategy alone.

How pricing works in this category

Most vendors here — Criteo, Pacvue, Skai, CommerceIQ, CitrusAd — are quote-only with pricing negotiated per account and no published rates. Perpetua and Teikametrics are the exceptions: both publish a base tier (a flat monthly fee up to an ad-spend threshold) with a percentage of ad spend charged above it, and both move to fully custom quotes at larger account sizes. That percentage-of-spend structure means cost scales automatically with how much you spend on ads, which is worth modeling against a flat-fee alternative before committing, especially as spend grows.

Common mistakes

• Evaluating CitrusAd as a tool a brand buys directly — it's built for the retailer running the network, not the advertiser buying on it.
• Assuming any buy-side tool covers Amazon and Walmart by default. Criteo explicitly does not; Perpetua's coverage outside Amazon should be confirmed directly rather than assumed from the feature list.
• Choosing on feature breadth before confirming retailer-network coverage for where you actually sell — a platform with excellent features for retailers you don't sell on delivers nothing.
• Ignoring that percentage-of-spend pricing (Perpetua, Teikametrics) compounds as spend grows; compare the total cost at your expected future spend level, not just the entry tier.

Questions to ask vendors

1. Which specific retailer networks does the platform support today, not on a roadmap, and is our top retailer among them?
2. Is pricing quote-only, and if so, what's the basis — ad spend managed, number of connected retailers, or something else?
3. If pricing is percentage-of-spend, what does the total cost look like at 2x our current ad spend?
4. Does the platform tie ad performance to inventory availability and content compliance, or only to bid and budget?
5. If we're evaluating this as a retailer rather than a brand, does the vendor even sell to us — or is it built for the buy side only?

See Pacvue vs Skai and Perpetua vs Teikametrics, and browse every tool in this category.