how retailers can measure the real value of online advertising with Adhese
An increasing number of shoppers start their journey online but complete their purchase in a physical shop. This behaviour is known as ROPO: Research Online, Purchase Offline. For retailers, attributing this behaviour is one of the most challenging aspects because a significant proportion of online influence never appears in online sales figures. Yet these hidden effects often determine a considerable part of retail media’s true value
This article explains what ROPO is, why it is so challenging to measure, and how retailers using Adhese can gain a comprehensive overview of the impact of both online and offline campaigns.
what is ROPO and why it matters
Many shoppers use a retailer’s website or social channels as the starting point of their buying journey. They explore product information, compare prices or check availability. A growing number of shoppers now begin this process through AI-powered tools as well, using conversational search to narrow down their options before they visit the retailer’s channels. The final purchase often takes place in-store, sometimes on the same day.
This means that online campaigns contribute to offline revenue and that clicks and online conversions only reveal part of the picture. Retailers risk undervaluing campaigns if they focus solely on online transactions. ROPO behaviour is not niche. In categories such as consumer electronics, DIY, beauty and home living, it is often the dominant pattern.
why ROPO is difficult to measure
Shop transactions rarely have a direct digital link with online behaviour due to privacy regulations preventing one-to-one user matching, limiting access to retailers’ shop data for external platforms, and blocking click and view signals from flowing into physical sales systems
However, there is a way to reliably capture ROPO impact without privacy risks or reliance on third parties.
how Adhese makes ROPO impact measurable
Adhese is built around the idea that retailers should retain control of their data. This approach enables accurate, privacy-safe ROPO measurement.
access raw campaign data through a Kafka topic
Retailers can access all raw campaign data, including impressions, clicks, costs, campaign types, format types and targeting parameters, through a Kafka topic. This data stream contains all datapoints to connect online research with offline purchase. This forms the basis of ROPO analysis.
linking Adhese data with sales in your own environment
The Adhese dataset includes detailed campaign information and, if enabled, online activity generated by customers on the retailer’s digital channels. This data is combined with the retailer’s own online and in-store sales, loyalty insights and product and category information within its analytics environment. Identity resolution plays an important role in this process. It uses privacy-safe identifiers to recognise customers across different touchpoints and to connect online interactions with offline signals such as shop visits and purchases. Adhese supports this capability in two key ways. First, by integrating with the retailer’s loyalty identity on-site, allowing authenticated users to be recognised in a privacy-safe manner. Second, by enabling identity exchange through a clean room or external identity platform, after which audiences can be activated over a direct private channel for offsite activity. These mechanisms make it possible to produce an accurate ROPO view by bringing exposure, engagement and transactions together in a single, coherent framework. Because all data processing happens within the retailer’s own systems, security, ownership and control remain fully intact.
ROPO analysis based on blended sales data
By examining impressions, clicks and costs alongside both online and offline sales, retailers can identify which campaigns drive online conversions, which ones mainly stimulate shop sales, whether certain formats perform better in offline uplift, how ROPO behaviour varies across categories and where budgets may need adjustment to reflect overlooked offline value.
ROAS and iROAS including offline revenue
This combined dataset allows retailers to calculate ROAS on total revenue, calculate iROAS for online and offline uplift and demonstrate to brands that retail media influences far more than online conversions alone. For brands and suppliers, this insight reveals how online campaigns help drive in-store sales.
Recent industry work also highlights the importance of using consistent and transparent measurement practices. IAB Europe’s Retail Media Measurement Standards provide a shared framework for defining metrics, evaluating performance and comparing results across retailers and markets. These guidelines help create clarity around on-site and off-site measurement, attribution methods and data quality expectations. By aligning with these principles, Adhese supports retailers in delivering reporting that is both industry-ready and fully compliant with privacy and data-ownership requirements.
ROPO in practice: proven impact across retail
Recent examples of ROPO measurement implementation in the industry demonstrate its successful application at scale. Consumer electronics retailers, in particular, have demonstrated that combining online engagement data with shop transactions provides richer attribution and significantly improves retail media performance. By capturing campaign exposure, building privacy-safe audience segments and identifying where online interaction leads to offline purchase, these retailers have strengthened their media propositions and increased commercial value.
A similar development is visible in the Dutch market, where major retailers are making campaign measurement more accessible and transparent. Albert Heijn’s Retail Media Services, for example, offers advertisers a self-service environment that provides clear insight into impressions, clicks and sales metrics, both online and offline. This approach shows how retailers are moving towards more structured reporting and forms the foundation for advanced analysis such as ROPO, where online exposure can be connected to in-store purchase behaviour.
Solutions in the market, including those offered by large Dutch retailers, illustrate how detailed campaign and sales metrics can be shared in a secure, self-service environment. Adhese enables retailers to achieve the same depth of insight by combining campaign data with their own sales, loyalty and product information within a privacy-safe framework.
This approach also creates new revenue opportunities. Retailers that offer ROPO insight to brands often see higher reporting revenue, as suppliers are keen to understand the full impact of their campaigns across all channels.
a practical example
Imagine a campaign for a grocery brand that appears to be underperforming in terms of online sales. The click-through rate is modest and direct online revenue is limited. In a traditional attribution model, this would place the campaign at a disadvantage.
The ROPO analysis demonstrates that the same campaign generates several times more revenue in the shop. Experience shows that while shoppers discover the product online, they prefer to buy it in person.
The result is a ROPO correction that reflects actual value, an iROAS far higher than online data alone would suggest, and more accurate budget allocation. It is evident that had ROPO analysis not been conducted, the campaign would have been underestimated in terms of its value.
the advantage of Adhese over external platforms
The majority of external advertising platforms are unable to measure the ROPO effect reliably for the following reasons:
- they lack access to shop transactions;
- they have no visibility of stock and category context;
- they depend on third-party identifiers that are disappearing; and
- they do not provide retailers with full data ownership.
Adhese works differently. The retailer retains ownership of all data and determines the manner and location of its use. This allows ROPO measurement to be conducted without the need to share customer information with third parties.
how Adhese bridges the gap
Adhese closely monitors all campaigns, traffic and bookings. Adhese data can be integrated directly into the retailer’s own data environment, allowing automated dashboards that combine campaign performance with sales and loyalty data. This provides a more complete and scalable view of retail media impact. Clients who prefer a manual workflow can still create custom reports that define which information will be shared, from detailed daily performance to summarised overviews. Once a campaign has been selected, these reports can be downloaded from the Documents tab, with the publisher deciding which documents are available. Spreadsheet reports export in a format compatible with Excel and the export campaign third-party tags report provides a text file containing all tags for the selected campaign.
These functions work together to provide retailers with the campaign data required for ROPO analysis while ensuring that sensitive sales information remains within the retailer’s environment.
how retailers can get started with Adhese
- Connect your on-site Adhese implementation with your identity layer
- Connect your off-site inventory via a unified ID or clean-room solution
- Merge Adhese campaign events with transaction events
- Consult insights into ROPO on campaign, creative level and SKU level, including all datapoints as dimensions of your dataset.
This results in a complete and accurate picture of campaign value, bringing retail media closer to real-world shopping behaviour.
ROPO measurement with Adhese
Retailers are increasingly interested in gaining insight into the total impact of retail media. ROPO provides a comprehensive view of the situation. Adhese enables retailers to measure ROPO reliably and securely, without the need to share data with external parties. Should you wish to implement ROPO analysis within your organisation, our team is at your service to assist you in developing dashboards, technical connections and reporting pipelines that will disclose the full performance of every campaign.
➤ Learn more about strategies for measuring retail media success
➤ Learn more about navigating consentless advertising in a privacy-safe ecosystem
➤ Read more about building a clearer retail media foundation
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