The Attribution Gap: Connecting Upper-Funnel Investment to Lower-Funnel Results

You’re spending on awareness. You’re spending on conversion. But can you prove they’re connected?

This is the attribution gap—the inability to trace how upper-funnel media investment (programmatic, connected TV, social) translates to lower-funnel results (retail media conversions, in-store sales).

It’s one of the most persistent challenges in commerce media. And for most brands, it remains unsolved.

The upper-funnel team can show reach and impressions. The lower-funnel team can show ROAS and attributed sales. But nobody can demonstrate that the awareness campaign actually drove the conversions—or that the conversions would have been lower without the awareness spend.

This gap has real consequences. It leads to under-investment in awareness, over-reliance on bottom-funnel tactics, and a fragmented view of what’s actually driving growth.

Key Takeaways

• • Most brands cannot connect upper-funnel awareness investment to lower-funnel conversion outcomes
• • This attribution gap leads to systematic under-investment in demand creation and over-investment in demand capture
• • Traditional last-click attribution gives all credit to the final touchpoint, making upper-funnel activity appear ineffective
• • Closing the gap requires unified measurement approaches: matched market tests, brand lift studies, or multi-touch attribution models
• • Commerce data—retailer audiences and purchase behaviour—offers new ways to connect awareness and conversion

Why Does the Gap Exist?

Attribution has always been challenging in marketing. But commerce media introduces specific complications.

Different data ecosystems

Upper-funnel media (programmatic, CTV) typically runs through demand-side platforms with their own tracking and measurement. Lower-funnel retail media runs through retailer platforms with different tracking, different attribution windows, and different definitions of success.

These systems don’t talk to each other natively. A shopper exposed to your CTV ad isn’t automatically flagged in Amazon’s attribution system. The data lives in separate silos.

Identity fragmentation

Even if platforms were willing to share data, matching users across environments is technically difficult. The person watching CTV on their living room screen isn’t easily connected to the shopper browsing Walmart.ca on their laptop or walking through Loblaw with their phone in their pocket.

Privacy changes have made this harder. Cookie deprecation, app tracking transparency, and evolving regulations all reduce the ability to track individuals across touchpoints.

Misaligned measurement timeframes

Upper-funnel activity operates on longer timeframes. Brand awareness builds over weeks and months. The impact of a CTV campaign might not show up in sales for 30, 60, or 90 days.

Lower-funnel measurement typically uses shorter windows—7 or 14 days for most retail media platforms. By the time the awareness investment translates to purchase behaviour, the attribution window has closed.

Organizational silos

Upper-funnel and lower-funnel activities are often managed by different teams, sometimes different agencies, with different budgets and different KPIs. The brand team runs awareness. The ecommerce team runs retail media. They report separately, plan separately, and rarely connect their data.

What Happens When You Can’t Connect the Dots?

The attribution gap has predictable consequences:

Under-investment in awareness

If you can’t prove that awareness drives conversion, it’s hard to justify awareness spend. Budget flows toward what’s measurable—which means lower-funnel tactics with clear, attributable returns. Over time, brands become over-indexed on demand capture and under-indexed on demand creation.

The “fishing in a shrinking pond” problem

When you only invest at the bottom of the funnel, you’re competing for shoppers who already have intent. But you’re not expanding the pool of potential buyers. Eventually, you’ve captured all the existing demand, and growth stalls—no matter how efficiently you’re running bottom-funnel campaigns.

Misattribution of success

Lower-funnel campaigns get credit for conversions they didn’t actually cause. A shopper who was driven to the category by a CTV ad, researched on Google, and finally clicked a sponsored product on Amazon gets fully attributed to Amazon. The CTV campaign shows no return. The brand concludes that CTV doesn’t work—when in reality, it was essential to the conversion.

Inability to optimize the full funnel

Without connected measurement, you can’t optimize the system. You don’t know if increasing awareness spend would improve conversion rates. You don’t know if your current awareness investment is sufficient, excessive, or misdirected. You’re making decisions in the dark.

How Do You Close the Gap?

There’s no perfect solution—attribution will always involve some uncertainty. But there are approaches that get you closer to understanding how upper-funnel and lower-funnel work together.

Matched market testing

The most rigorous approach. Run upper-funnel media in some geographic markets and not others. Compare conversion rates and sales outcomes between the test and control markets. This isolates the causal impact of awareness investment.

The limitation: it requires sufficient scale, geographic flexibility, and patience. You’re essentially running an experiment on your business.

Brand lift studies

Measure changes in awareness, consideration, and intent among audiences exposed to upper-funnel media vs. those who weren’t. If awareness is doing its job, exposed audiences should show higher brand metrics—which should eventually translate to higher conversion rates.

The limitation: lift studies measure attitudes, not behaviour. They indicate that awareness is working but don’t directly connect to sales.

Multi-touch attribution (MTA)

Build models that assign fractional credit to multiple touchpoints along the customer journey, rather than giving all credit to the last click. MTA can reveal the contribution of upper-funnel activity to eventual conversions.

The limitation: MTA models are only as good as the data that feeds them. Cross-platform identity matching remains challenging, and model assumptions significantly impact outputs.

Unified commerce data

This is where commerce media creates new possibilities. Retailers like Loblaw have both audience data (who their shoppers are) and transaction data (what they buy). When you run awareness campaigns using retailer audience segments—and measure against retailer sales data—you can close the loop in ways that weren’t previously possible.

For example: target PC Optimum audiences with CTV ads, then measure whether those same audiences show higher purchase rates in Loblaw stores or online. The retailer data provides the connective tissue that general-market advertising lacks.

What Does Connected Measurement Look Like in Practice?

Imagine running a commerce media campaign with unified measurement:

• 1. Awareness stage: You run connected TV and programmatic display targeting retailer audiences—households that purchase in your category at Loblaw, based on PC Optimum data.
• 2. Consideration stage: Exposed audiences are retargeted with more detailed messaging, driving them toward online research or store visits.
• 3. Conversion stage: Retail media captures demand at the point of purchase—sponsored products on Loblaw.ca, in-store digital screens at Loblaw locations.
• 4. Measurement: Because all three stages are targeting the same underlying audience, you can measure the full journey. Did households exposed to all three stages convert at higher rates than those exposed to only conversion-stage media? What’s the incremental lift from awareness? From consideration?

This isn’t hypothetical—it’s what integrated commerce media makes possible. The data infrastructure exists. The retailer platforms are building these capabilities. The question is whether brands are set up to use them.

The Bottom Line

The attribution gap is real, but it’s not insurmountable.

Closing it requires moving beyond last-click platform metrics toward unified measurement—matched market tests, brand lift studies, multi-touch attribution, and commerce data that connects awareness to purchase.

The brands that figure this out will have a significant advantage. They’ll be able to invest confidently in full-funnel commerce media, knowing that each stage is contributing to business outcomes. They’ll stop under-investing in awareness and over-relying on bottom-funnel efficiency.

If you’re struggling to connect your upper-funnel investment to lower-funnel results, we can help you build a measurement approach that closes the gap.

Get in touch → commercemediaagency.co

 

Visit commercemediaagency.co to learn more about our approach.