What Back-to-School Shopping Teaches Retailers About Commerce Media Success

Back-to-school shopping is becoming a longer, more deliberate, and more cross-channel process. The National Retail Federation found that 78 percent of shoppers are expecting higher prices on back-to-school items this season. And with 46 percent saying they’re waiting for the best deals to finish their shopping, consumers are taking more time to research, compare, and decide where and when to buy.

For retail media networks (RMNs), that behavior presents a challenge. Shoppers may discover products on social media, compare prices across retailer websites and apps, wait for promotions, and complete purchases across multiple visits and channels. From the customer’s perspective, this may feel like one continuous shopping journey. To retailers, however, it can appear as a series of disconnected signals.

Fragmentation Hides the Path to Purchase

When those signals remain disconnected, a media network may not know whether it's reaching a new prospect, an existing loyalty member, or a customer who has already purchased. A shopper might browse backpacks on a retailer’s website, engage with a sponsored product in its app, and complete the purchase in-store. If those interactions are treated as separate events, the media network will miss the full path to purchase and likely miss attributing the sale to the brand’s advertisements, limiting the value they show to advertisers, who need confidence that a retailer can reach the right audiences and connect media exposure to meaningful business outcomes.

This fragmentation also affects personalization and creates cost inefficiencies. The media network may continue serving an ad after the shopper has converted, creating irrelevant ad frequency, weaker audience construction, and difficulty determining which media exposures influenced a purchase.

Loyalty-Based Identity Connects the Journey

RMNs have an opportunity to improve ad relevance and personalization, and increase both effectiveness and efficiency by making loyalty-based identity the connective tissue across the customer journey. Loyalty data becomes more valuable when it’s activated responsibly across a retailer’s ecosystem, not treated as a static list of members. It enables retailers to connect signals from digital engagement, loyalty activity, and transactions while respecting customer experiences.

Establishing a robust customer hierarchy ensures RMNs can capture and unify an array of consumer data. This framework allows for more sophisticated activation and measurement across channels that function at different levels, such as CTV, which primarily engages audiences at the household scale. By leveraging identity resolution, these networks are also able to curate the high-quality, interoperable data necessary to thrive in an agentic future.

Seasonal Learnings Turn Into Year-Round Growth

Back-to-school should be more than a seasonal sales moment for RMNs. It should be a test-and-learn period that informs campaigns, customer experiences, and media planning for the rest of the year. The behaviors RMNs observe — how audiences move between channels, which products drive demand, how often shoppers engage, and what ultimately converts — can reveal where the customer journey is working and where it’s breaking down.

Turning those observations into action starts with an audit of identity gaps. Retailers should identify where customer records, loyalty profiles, digital IDs, and transaction data fail to connect, then prioritize journeys where cross-channel behavior is most visible, such as school supplies, apparel, and electronics. They should strengthen the underlying data through consistent identifiers, clear governance, permission management, and processes for resolving duplicate or outdated records.

Start by thinking about your business outcomes and interoperability. Measurement should be designed before activation, with business outcomes and incrementality questions defined before a campaign launches. RMNs should also build interoperability across retailer-owned channels, advertising partners, and measurement environments. The most valuable learnings can inform audience segmentation, merchandising decisions, upcoming promotions, and customer experiences, not just advertiser reporting.

Use back-to-school to strengthen your identity and measurement strategy. You'll be better prepared to deliver relevant experiences, prove incremental value, and build a media network business that compounds its impact across every major shopping season.

Laura Carrier is a Growth Strategist at LiveRamp, where she partners with key commerce media networks, publishers and brands on go-to-market strategy, sales enablement, and advisory work.