Shoppable Media Benefits and Best Practices
How Multichannel Brands Can Drive Retail Sales
and Maximize Media ROI
From Reach to Retail: Unlocking Growth
For multichannel consumer brands, the pressure to drive eCommerce sales through retail partners is greater than ever. Retailer performance now defines success, not just for eCommerce teams, but also for marketers and media strategists. As Direct-To-Consumer (DTC) acquisition costs rise and retail media networks dominate, brands are shifting spend, but often lose visibility and growth.
Retail media converts existing audiences, while national media drives net-new customers. To increase profitability, brands need both to reach shoppers across the entire journey.
Enter Shoppable Media: the bridge between brand storytelling and real-time, retailer-connected sales.
What Is Shoppable Media?
Shoppable Media, or shoppable content, is digital content that drives shopper engagement and enables direct purchase actions.
Shoppable Media spans formats like display ads, videos, social posts, WhatsApp messages, CTV ads, and more. By merging content and commerce, shoppable content turns engagement into instant conversion opportunities.
Brands can route shoppers to a DTC site, a retail partner, or offer multiple checkout options. This flexible, shopper-first approach boosts conversion, improves satisfaction, and delivers valuable insights into buyer behavior.
Here’s how the multi-retailer journey typically works from a shopper’s perspective:
- SEE: The shopper sees an ad and clicks on a ‘Shop Now’ Call-To-Action,
- CHOOSE: …selects a preferred online or in-store retailer,
- BUY: … and initiates checkout.
Traditional Digital Media vs. Shoppable Media
Traditional digital media builds awareness and drives traffic but often falls short in linking these actions to actual sales. Shoppable Media is designed to turn engagement into purchases. It makes buying easier and offers better measurement from a commerce point of view, linking results to retail outcomes. The table below highlights the key differences between the two approaches.
| Traditional Digital Media | Shoppable Media | |
| Goal | Drive awareness, clicks, and site traffic | Drive direct product interaction and conversion |
| User Journey | Multi-step: ad → site → search → DTC cart / further search for retailers | Streamlined: ad → retailer PDP / add-to-cart → purchase |
| Measurability | Clicks, impressions, site visits | Purchase Intent, retailer choice, conversion path, attributable sales |
| Consumer Experience | Passive or awareness-focused | Active, engaging, commerce-enabled |
| Attribution | Often disconnected from final purchase | Tied to commerce outcomes via multi-retailer data |
How Shoppable Media Works: Use Cases
You can layer Shoppable Media to nearly any digital format to turn your brand storytelling into direct paths to purchase. It works across paid, owned, and earned media. Popular formats include social, CTV, display, video, influencer content, and digital out-of-home. Here are some key use cases:
1. Paid Social Campaigns
-
Turn Meta, TikTok, Snapchat, and Pinterest ads into instant purchase paths
-
Use first-party data and shopper behavior to identify and retarget high-intent audiences
-
Optimize creatives and placements based on retailer-level performance
Ideal for: Product launches, promotions, and audience testing
Case Study: Optimizing Media Performance in Real Time
Aperol UK partnered with MikMak to launch a shoppable ad campaign across social, video, and email. By collecting first-party data and optimizing in real-time, the brand increased its Purchase Intent Rate, the share of shoppers who engage with retailer checkout options, by 3.7x.
|
|
Case Study: Driving Special Occasion Sales with Digital Coupons
An ice cream brand made their social ads shoppable with MikMak to boost Thanksgiving sales. A special Kroger offer was highlighted using MikMak’s digital coupon feature, helping drive more shoppers to the store.
|
 |
Brand Example: Boosting Sales with Influencer-Driven Commerce
Bella kitchenware brand uses MikMak to turn influencer content into seamless shopping experiences. Shoppers can look at products from posts and compare prices from different retailers. This makes buying easier and boosts sales.
Brand Example: Boosting Sales with Influencer-Driven Commerce
Bella kitchenware brand uses MikMak to turn influencer content into seamless shopping experiences. Shoppers can look at products from posts and compare prices from different retailers. This makes buying easier and boosts sales.
Brand Example: Driving eCommerce from Your Owned Media
Lindt used MikMak's shoppable media in its email newsletters for Easter. This helped customers choose from checkout options for Lindor chocolate bars.
Brand Example: Making Out-Of-Home Campaigns Shoppable
The Botanist Gin by Rémy Cointreau made its Times Square event shoppable with a QR code powered by MikMak. This allowed consumers to instantly purchase from their preferred retailer. The brand also gained valuable data on shopper engagement, proving how out-of-home activations can drive measurable results.
Brand Example: Accelerating Purchases from a TV Ad
Carolina Herrera integrated MikMak-powered shoppable media into their TV fragrance ad, turning a traditional awareness format into a direct path to purchase while capturing valuable shopper engagement insights.
Barbie x MikMak Retailer Direct
Coty - Hugo Boss x MikMak Retailer Direct
Why Shoppable Media Matters: Benefits for Brands & Agencies
Shoppable Media is more than a tactical addition; it's a strategic driver of eCommerce growth, retail success, and media profitability. Here's how it delivers measurable value for both brands and their media partners:
🛒 Drives Incremental eCommerce Sales:
Connects media to retailer transactions, reduces drop-off, and meets consumers where they prefer to buy.
Case Study: Increasing Omnichannel Marketing Effectiveness
Remy Martin UK expanded its MikMak use from the brand website to Shoppable Media campaigns during a key holiday, driving a 3.2x boost in website sales. This omnichannel approach connected social and website traffic to retailer conversions, boosting overall sales.
|
 |
💰 Boosts Media Efficiency & ROI:
Tie spend directly to sales, not proxy KPIs. Optimize performance by channel, SKU, and audience.
Case Study: Increasing Return on Advertising Spend
BIC UK partnered with MikMak and their agency PHD to improve ad click-through rates and targeting efficiency. By leveraging first-party data to build more effective lookalike audiences, the brand achieved a 12 percent increase in ROAS.
📈 Enables Full-Funnel Measurement:
From awareness to conversion, track the complete shopper journey and prove media impact at every stage.
Case Study: Improving Marketing Effectiveness
Kraft Heinz uses data from MikMak to improve the consumer experience and create new value opportunities for the brand.
🛍️ Strengthens Retailer Partnerships:
Offer multi-retailer choice, avoid channel conflict, and drive collaborative retail success.
🔍 Delivers Rich Commerce Insights:
Gain visibility into real shopper behavior across platforms and retailers for smarter decision-making.
🎯 Unifies Brand + Performance Goals:
Make brand campaigns shoppable and measurable, aligning eCommerce and media KPIs in one strategy.
How to Measure the Impact of Shoppable Media
Shoppable Media connects campaigns directly to sales performance. This helps brands understand which marketing efforts lead to conversions and where improvements can drive a higher return on investment.
Advanced solutions like MikMak provide a consistent and reliable way to track Shoppable Media and commerce-related data across your organic and paid media. You can pinpoint which channels, campaigns, creatives, and audiences actually drive business. Go beyond top-of-funnel metrics to access real-time conversion data, including:
-
Purchase Intent Rate: The percentage of shoppers who clicked through to at least one retailer. This shows how effectively your content drives purchase behavior.
-
Purchase Intent Value: An estimated monetary value generated. This helps calculate the potential revenue impact of your Shoppable Media campaigns.
-
Add-to-Cart actions at specific retailers: These are strong signals that a shopper is ready to buy and can highlight which retailers and placements perform best.
-
Total Basket Attribution Sales: The total sales value tracked from purchases made within the retailer’s defined attribution window.
With tools like MikMak you can also compare your performance against category benchmarks. See how your brand stacks up against other brands in your category.
Best Practices for Launching and Scaling Shoppable Media Campaigns
Marketers find Shoppable Media most effective when they treat it as a strategic capability, not just a campaign tactic. These best practices help brands launch successfully and scale profitably across channels, products, and retailers.
Unlocking Full-Funnel Commerce with Shoppable Media
Shoppable Media is transforming how brands connect media and commerce. It shortens the path to purchase, increases marketing ROI, and provides rich data for smarter decisions.
Brands that embrace Shoppable Media are not just keeping pace; they're setting the pace. They're aligning teams across eCommerce, media, and insights. They're turning awareness campaigns into sales engines. And they're proving, with real data, what’s working and where to optimize.
Whether you're launching a new product, scaling across retail partners, or trying to unify your performance metrics, MikMak provides the Shoppable Media tools and insights needed to succeed in the new era of commerce.
If you’re ready to put Shoppable Media to work for your brand, get in touch today!
