Winning with retail media: Why small and mid-size brands choose Commerce Max

Discover how Commerce Max empowers small and mid-size brands to excel in retail media. Streamline, unify, and optimize across 225+ retail media networks.
Updated on April 29, 2025

Retail media can sometimes feel like a gated community for small and mid-size brands. You’ve got your limited budget, a small (but mighty) team, and the big guys are always grabbing the prime spots. Add in the fragmented platforms, differing standards, and a sea of competition, and it’s easy to feel like you’re stuck on the outside looking in.

But having a successful retail media program doesn’t have to feel that way. Commerce Max makes it easier for small and mid-size brands to get going. We streamline campaign management, bring together fragmented data, and help you stretch your budget further—all without needing a dedicated team. Curious how? Let’s dive in.

What’s making your job harder today?

The explosive growth of retail media has led to a proliferation of networks, each with its own login, ad formats, and measurement standards. Managing these varied platforms has become a major headache for advertisers, causing significant platform fatigue and confusion around performance metrics. You’re likely asking, “How can I confidently know my investment is translating into real sales and growth when everything feels so disconnected? And how can my small team manage all these disparate platforms?”

Commerce Max addresses these pain points with a unified, user-friendly solution built specifically for brands like yours. Get streamlined, scalable tools to directly access inventory across 225+ retail media networks all in one platform. You read that right—you can plan, buy, measure, and optimize campaigns across hundreds of retailer partners from one central location.

Spend more time selling products, less time juggling platforms

As a smaller or mid-sized brand, you’re often trying to scale up while keeping budgets tight. Commerce Max solves that challenge elegantly. By seamlessly integrating onsite and offsite campaigns across a vast retailer network, you have the power to scale your efforts efficiently. No more hopping between disjointed platforms, manually adjusting strategies retailer by retailer, or trying to compare apples and oranges. With Commerce Max, you can advertise products across multiple retailers effortlessly, saving you valuable time and effort.

Precision targeting means smarter spending

You’ve heard it before: marketing is about reaching the right shopper at the right time.  Retail media is one of the few strategies that can actually deliver on that promise.

Commerce Max sponsored products leverage real-time shopper intent data and advanced AI-driven optimization to ensure your products appear exactly when and where they should. Powered by first-party data from 225+ leading retailers, Commerce Max dynamically targets shoppers based on actual browsing, searching, and buying behaviors. This means less guesswork, less wasted spend, and more conversions.

2025 Retail Media Trends

2025 Retail Media Trends

Transparency is no longer a luxury

Tired of guessing where your ad dollars went? Commerce Max’s closed-loop reporting connects the dots from ad exposure to product purchase. With full visibility into your campaign performance, you can finally understand what’s working, what’s not, and how to fix it.

With Commerce Max, you’ll get granular insights down to the SKU-level. This transparency lets you confidently prove ROI, adjust your strategies quickly, and maximize every ad dollar.

Going full funnel multiplies success

When people think of retail media, they think of bottom funnel sponsored product ads. These are highly effective at driving sales and ROAS. But with Commerce Max, retail media is capable of even more. By leveraging onsite display and onsite video ads, brands can reach shoppers earlier in their journey on a retailer’s website or app to influence the discovery and research process. Taking a full funnel approach like this can deliver big gains.

Our studies show that combining sponsored products with onsite display and onsite video increases conversion rates dramatically—up to 5.6 times higher compared to using sponsored products alone. The full funnel approach also delivers 5.6 times more new-to-brand customers. With Commerce Max, marketers can easily launch and manage full funnel commerce media strategies and have complete control over campaign execution and optimization.

Built to simplify your work

Commerce Max takes the guesswork out of reaching the right audience and crafting impactful ads. With powerful audience builders, you can tap into first-party retailer SKU-level intent and purchase data that’s refreshed daily—so your campaigns are always targeting the most relevant shoppers. Leverage both online and offline data to build customized audiences based on SKUs viewed, purchased, or added to cart when activating Onsite Display & Video or Offsite campaigns. Plus, with a variety of creative format options (including dynamic creatives), your brand’s message can engage shoppers wherever they are in the funnel .

And when it comes to optimizing your campaigns, Commerce Max’s AI optimization is like having a data-driven assistant working around the clock. Trained on shopping data for nearly two decades, the AI handles personalization, relevancy, and dynamic bidding, allowing your campaign to be optimized for every impression —without you having to lift a finger.

Trust and brand safety

With Commerce Max, brands get peace of mind through guaranteed brand safety—think third-party tracking, default blocking of made-for-advertising sites, and keyword exclusions to keep ads in the right context. Plus, reporting transparency means you’ll know exactly where your ads show up and how they’re performing, with viewability metrics for onsite video and offsite baked right into the dashboard. And with targeting controls like inclusion/exclusion lists and predicted viewability thresholds, you’re always in the driver’s seat when it comes to campaign precision.

Commerce Max is also officially MRC Accredited for Clicks and Impressions for sponsored products and onsite display. The MRC certified that “The click & impression metrics in Commerce Max are standardized and adhere to rigorous quality standards.”

Real-world results speak louder

Still skeptical? Let’s talk numbers:

One leading art materials brand partnered with Commerce Max for sponsored products and onsite display campaigns at Michaels.com. The results were beyond impressive—a 926% increase in return on ad spend (ROAS), a 412% jump in sales, and over 125,000 impressions.

Commerce Max’s proven ability to blend multiple formats, such as sponsored products and onsite display, consistently delivers stronger outcomes than isolated tactics.

Commerce Max: Simpler, smarter retail media

You have a million things on your plate—retail media complexity shouldn’t be one of them. Commerce Max is built to help mid-size and smaller brands streamline their way to retail media success. With smarter targeting, complete transparency, unmatched scalability, and proven results, it’s no longer a question of whether you should choose Commerce Max, but rather, why wouldn’t you?

Ready to simplify retail media? Commerce Max is waiting.

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Ann Pyle

Ann revels in finding the simplest and clearest way to convey a thought. Her favorite word is 'moxie', which she tries to embody whenever possible. She's been developing content strategies and writing for the tech and B2B space for more than a decade. This, along with her SEO and advertising agency ...

Senior Manager Global Content
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