The fundamentals of CPG measurement—what marketers need to know

It’s never been more important for consumer packaged goods marketers to understand the true value of their advertising. Yet, many established measurement playbooks fail to account for the increased fragmentation across both shopping behaviors and media consumption patterns, making it difficult to understand what’s actually driving incremental sales and where those sales are occurring. In 2025, CPG marketers will face a variety of new challenges and opportunities, including the potential impacts of looming tariffs, continued evolution of shopping behaviors amid inflation resulting in the value wars, the continued rise of new media channels and more. To overcome these obstacles and evangelize the opportunities ahead, marketers must reconsider the meaning of measurement. Rather than simply a means to an end, constructive measurement can be a powerful driver for effectiveness—one that can yield greater efficiency, insights and proven incremental return on ad spend (iROAS). This isn’t a farfetched industry fantasy—strategic marketers are already on board and seeing an impact. Here are the four guiding principles of effective CPG measurement that every marketer needs to know to drive performance today: 1. Double down on incremental outcomes When it comes to key performance indicators, prioritize incremental, real-world outcomes. Go beyond the typical KPIs like clicks and views. Combine them with real-world outcomes like incremental visits, sales and iROAS. Focusing on the most impactful measurement metrics and standardizing your approach and focusing on optimization efforts across the board will provide the ability to close the loop on marketing investments and justify incremental spend based on performance. This isn’t theoretical. CPG brands who adopted this approach have achieved remarkable results, including $3.06 iROAS per customer, 12.6% incremental sales lift, and $2.3 million in incremental sales, showcasing the impact of closed-loop reporting and further fueling advertising investments that drive proven results. 2. Eliminate measurement silos to improve effectiveness across channels It feels like every day we’re reading about a new retail media network launching or social platform breaking onto the scene. But if measurement is siloed within each of these channels or a select few, the reality is the true impact of that advertising spend cannot be effectively measured in a world where fragmented media and shopping is increasing. For example, let’s say a group of value-seeking shoppers sees retail media ads for a snack product at their preferred grocery or big box chain, and then ends up buying it at a nearby discount store or warehouse club later that day. Without a holistic view of performance across channels, those incremental outcomes are overlooked. Conversely, from the retailer perspective, this holistic approach can better highlight the incremental value driven by their advertising channels, like retail media networks, including incremental sales taking place outside of their stores. Bridging those gaps enables marketers to gain a holistic view of campaign performance, including the granular performance or sales lift across channels and individual retailers, which assures that every incremental outcome is accounted for. 3. Maximize sales lift and impact with real-time optimization The beauty of modern attribution capabilities is that they empower marketers to quickly act on learnings while the campaign is happening. Faced with fierce competition in the CPG landscape, every incremental dollar and sale counts. Whether it’s optimizing toward top-performing media, creatives, offers or markets, the ability to not only better understand shifts in behavior and performance but act on them while the campaign is still in flight will help maximize investments. In fact, according to an InMarket and CMO Council study, advertisers leveraging always-on, real-time optimization measurement tools drove up to 11 times greater media efficiency, putting existing dollars to work in driving the incremental outcomes that fuel and justify incremental budget asks. 4. Get granular with insights to understand fragmented shopping Adopting a holistic approach also uncovers opportunities for diving deeper into insights to understand what’s driving success and where there are potential missed opportunities. Analyzing performance by segment is a fantastic example. Credit: InMarket (Click image enlarge) In our current era of value shopping, strong loyalty in certain CPG categories has shifted. In some product categories, such as snacks or cheese, for example, where there are more options, an InMarket study found that over 40% of shoppers purchased at least four different brands. For those shoppers, price (63%) and product quality (63%) were most important when choosing CPG brands. Credit: InMarket (Click image enlarge) Segmenting a category or brand into four equal-sized groups from highest to lowest spending can also yield powerful, actionable insights to drive growth. Across most categories, the middle 50% of consumers account for approximately 20% of a brand’s sales but 40% of the category spending. This movable middle segment presents an incredible growth opportunity to shift category share to the brand. For CPG brands, this trend toward fragmented shopping has created new challenges and opportunities that can be addressed by measuring performance and acting on important insights like the moveable middle. This combination can be a gamechanger in terms of driving better outcomes, performance and loyalty for brands with the data and tools to take action. This should be the year of leaving no crumbs behind. Marketers are all operating under the same two goals—create the best consumer experiences possible and shatter marketing objectives and benchmarks. Successful measurement isn’t just about depicting results. It should be a driving force in optimizing outcomes. Following this playbook and working with the right measurement partner helps brands face impending challenges head-on and, above all, provides greater, faster and more actionable insights to drive better incremental results and customer experiences.

The fundamentals of CPG measurement—what marketers need to know

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