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Commerce media is set to grow to more than $100 billion by 2026, which represents over 20% of advertising budgets.
The modern tech stack for Commerce Media requires a composable architecture
The Compound Marketing Engine for Commerce Media Networks is the audience building, intelligence, and insights engine of the modern commerce media tech stack.
Many companies today are sitting on a goldmine of first-party data that they want to monetize — and it’s never been a better time.
Commerce media is set to grow to more than $100 billion by 2026, which represents over 20% of advertising budgets. The creation and optimization of a commerce media network represents an unmissable opportunity for companies to drive new, high-margin revenue streams, and offer better ROAS and ROI to their advertisers.
However, building a commerce media network has historically been manual, time consuming, and resource-intensive, especially when it comes to audience building and data management.
Enterprise media teams can’t easily access their first party data from an enterprise data cloud without help from the data or engineering team, which often means multiple back and forth requests and wait times that stretch out for weeks. Accessing data from a marketing cloud has the same limitations with the added problem that data is stale and out-of-date. Ad Ops teams are made to wait in line to build audiences for their advertisers, resulting in missed deadlines and revenue opportunities.
Additionally, companies looking to build a commerce media network are often forced to work with disconnected, siloed off tools that lead to data duplication and lack of data governance, making it even harder to move fast and stay compliant.
The result is a process that is slow, manual, and risky — exactly the opposite of what is needed to compete in today’s ever-changing market.
But there’s a solution.
To move faster and launch their media network with confidence, companies need a modern Commerce Media tech stack that is built directly on the data cloud and enables granular, specific audience building.
Building a commerce media network on composable architecture enables companies to launch new revenue streams faster, reduce data governance risk, and lower costs due to a streamlined tech stack.
A modern, composable tech stack for Commerce Media includes:
Composable architecture centered around an enterprise data cloud: All first party data from your enterprise data cloud, such as Snowflake, BigQuery, or Databricks, is accessible to your team and becomes the foundation of your modern tech stack.
An audience building + intelligence layer: Ad Ops teams have self-serve audience building capabilities supported by intuitive, no-code UI, and agentic AI.
Activation to on-site and offsite ad platforms: Audiences can be activated to any other part of your existing ad-tech stack, particularly on-site ads, off-site ad servers, and DSPs.
Measurement and insights: Receive transparent reporting on campaign performance, incrementality, and ROI that creates a centralized view for advertisers.
Composability is the non-negotiable, core requirement in a modern stack, but the audience and intelligence layer is where companies looking to build a commerce media network will truly win or lose.
Without a strong audience and intelligence layer built on the data cloud, that treasure trove of first party data might never translate into precise and monetizable audience segments for your advertisers. You might have the data and the channels, but you need the engine that turns into outcomes.
That’s where The GrowthLoop Compound Marketing Engine comes in.
The GrowthLoop Compound Marketing Engine for Commerce Media Networks is the audience building, intelligence and insights engine for the modern Commerce Media tech stack, enabling companies to launch a media network with speed and precision.
The Compound Marketing Engine connects directly to your enterprise data cloud, ensuring audiences are built from the freshest data.
Data can be imported and mapped in minutes, and enriched with identity solutions like Audience Acuity or Metarouter to improve match rates and extend reach. For example, a retailer running connected TV campaigns can enrich its first-party shopper data with household-level identifiers, allowing advertisers to see their campaigns reach not just individual buyers but entire households.
With GrowthLoop, you can launch a commerce media network quickly and easily while avoiding the cost and risk of moving data into yet another system.
With the Compound Marketing Engine, building audiences is no longer dependent on data engineers or SQL. Ad ops teams can create granular, precise audiences in minutes using our no-code UI and AI recommendations. Workflows that once required weeks of manual effort now take just minutes - allowing you to seize timely revenue opportunities with your advertisers instead of letting them slip away.
Additionally, you can validate reach instantly with Audience Breakdowns—by user, household, device, or purchase behavior—so advertisers can see the granular detail and feel confident in the audiences they’re targeting. Teams can even enrich audiences with new Secondary Custom Attributes like device IDs and purchase history, all from the same interface. With Reusable Export templates, ad ops teams can publish to multiple destinations in just a click, ensuring audience consistency across campaigns and while eliminating repetitive setup.
With the Compound Marketing Engine for Commerce Media Networks, an Ad Ops Manager could quickly and easily segment “Frequent Business Travelers who’ve taken flights in the last 90 days” into an audience for a travel brand.
The Compound Marketing Engine for Commerce Media Networks puts the power of agentic AI into the hands of ad ops teams to unleash speed and precision across their operations.
These Growth Agents supercharge the audience building process with a natural language interface, so users just ask for the audience they want and let AI do the rest. For example, a user could simply ask to “find customers who are likely to buy event tickets this month” and receive instantly actionable audiences.
The always-on recommendations surface audience opportunities that Ad Ops teams can take directly to advertisers, such as a segment of shoppers showing early signals of interest in new product categories, which might not have been identified through manual analysis.
The Compound Marketing Engine makes every campaign smarter than the last by writing performance data back to the data cloud and creating a continuous measurement loop.
Impressions, clicks, and conversions are captured in one place, while incrementality reporting proves true ROAS and ROI across campaigns. With the Compound Marketing Engine, reporting is self-serve and available when needed, meaning no more long wait times for data teams to pull and consolidate reports. Instead, Ad Ops teams can get results immediately and share that with their advertisers, enabling them to iterate quickly, improve on campaigns, and capture opportunities before they are gone.
Integrations with analytics platforms further enrich this loop, so results aren’t just measured, they also directly inform the next campaign. Instead of running campaigns in isolation, you compound value over time. Your advertiser’s campaigns get sharper, faster, and more profitable than the last.
Once an audience is built, the Compound Marketing Engine makes it easy to send it to wherever you want it to go. In a single governed workflow, audiences can be activated to any destination:
A data onboarding platform like LiveRamp
On-site ad networks
DSPs such as DV360 or The Trade Desk
Paid media platforms, social
With Multi-Export, a grocery delivery platform can quickly create an audience of shoppers who bought organic snacks in the last 30 days and send it to multiple destinations simultaneously, without manual work or duplicated effort.
When a commerce media network is operating at its highest, it can support hundreds of advertisers. Managing that many brands can introduce some specific challenges like the need for data governance, clear data boundaries, and the ability to handle sensitive data and PII.
GrowthLoop provides role-based permissions and customized data views to ensure security and compliance across different advertisers to make sure commerce media teams and advertisers retain full visibility and control.
Security and compliance are requirements for running a Commerce Media Network. GrowthLoop’s SOC 2 Type II certified platform enforces enterprise-grade controls across data access, governance, and privacy. Because data never leaves your cloud, legal and IT teams gain peace of mind while advertisers gain the transparency they demand.
Audit trails, governed activation, and clean room integrations ensure data privacy and accountability. The result is a single, secure platform for audience building, activation, and measurement.
The Compound Marketing Engine for Commerce Media Networks empowers companies to monetize their first-party data with confidence, unlock new revenue streams, and prove ROI faster than ever before.
Interested in learning more about how to build a modern commerce media network? Register and join us for our webinar, AI-powered Commerce Media: The New Revenue Engine for Modern Enterprises.
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