Digital advertising gives marketers access to more data than ever before. We can measure impressions, clicks, video views, website visits, and conversions. But for food and beverage brands, there’s one important question those dashboards don’t always answer:
Is our advertising actually helping sell more products?
When most customers purchase products at grocery stores rather than directly from a website, that’s not always an easy question to answer.
A consumer might see your commercial while streaming their favorite show, encounter your brand again on social media, and then pick up your product during their weekly grocery run. The advertising may have influenced that purchase, but none of those digital interactions may be directly connected to the sale.
Does that mean the advertising wasn’t effective? Of course not.
It means we need to think differently about how we define and measure success.
The Problem With Measuring Everything Through a Performance Lens
One of digital advertising’s biggest advantages is its measurability. But when we have access to so many metrics, it’s tempting to prioritize the ones that are easiest to track.
Clicks, click-through rates, and website conversions are tangible and easy to compare. But for a brand whose primary sales channel is retail, those metrics tell only part of the story.
Consider a connected TV campaign promoting a dairy brand. A viewer watches a commercial, remembers the product, and chooses it over a competitor the next time they’re shopping.
Now consider a display campaign that generates thousands of inexpensive clicks but does little to improve brand familiarity or influence purchase decisions.
Which campaign delivered more value?
The answer isn’t necessarily the one with the better click-through rate.
That’s why it’s important to distinguish between metrics that demonstrate engagement and those that help us understand business impact. Both have value, but they’re not interchangeable.
Brand Awareness Isn’t Just a Nice-to-Have
For food and beverage brands, awareness can be one of the most important drivers of future sales.
Think about how people shop for everyday grocery products. They’re often making decisions quickly, choosing between familiar brands, comparing prices, or reaching for something they’ve purchased before.
Being a brand consumers recognize and trust matters, especially when entering a new market, expanding distribution, or introducing a new product.
An established dairy brand in its home market may already have strong recognition and loyalty. Its strategy might focus on maintaining that familiarity or encouraging consumers to purchase more frequently.
Take that same brand into a new geographic market, and the challenge changes. Before consumers can develop a preference for your product, they need to know your brand exists.
In that situation, investing in channels that deliver broad reach, repeated exposure, and memorable creative may be more valuable than optimizing exclusively for website traffic.
You can’t expect consumers to choose a brand they don’t know, and you shouldn’t expect every awareness investment to produce an immediate, trackable conversion.
Not Every Channel Should Be Measured the Same Way
A strong digital media strategy uses different channels to accomplish different objectives. The challenge comes when we evaluate all of them using the same performance metrics.
Connected TV, streaming audio, online video, and paid social can build familiarity and keep a brand top of mind. Display advertising can reinforce messaging and encourage consideration, while retail media can reach consumers closer to purchase and potentially connect advertising exposure to actual sales.
These channels shouldn’t be expected to deliver identical results because they’re not doing identical jobs.
A CTV campaign designed to introduce a brand to a new audience shouldn’t be judged primarily on click-through rate. Similarly, a retail media campaign intended to drive product sales should be evaluated using available sales and return metrics.
The key is to establish what success looks like before a campaign launches rather than trying to make every channel fit the same reporting framework.
Connecting Digital Advertising to Real-World Sales
So how do we better understand whether digital advertising is influencing grocery purchases?
The answer is often a combination of data sources that provide a more complete picture.
For awareness campaigns, reach, frequency, video completion rates, and brand lift studies can help evaluate exposure and changes in consumer perception. For engagement-focused campaigns, website traffic and landing page views offer additional indicators.
Retail media networks have also created opportunities to connect advertising investment to product sales through metrics such as attributed revenue, return on ad spend, and new-to-brand customers.
However, even retail media attribution doesn’t tell the entire story. Platforms use different attribution methodologies, and reported sales don’t necessarily mean advertising was solely responsible.
Looking at broader sales trends, distribution changes, seasonality, and promotional activity helps provide important context.
The goal isn’t to claim that every sale can be traced back to an advertisement. It’s to better understand how media contributes to business results.
Are We Undervaluing Advertising We Can’t Directly Attribute?
This is a question I think more marketers should be asking.
Digital advertising has conditioned us to expect immediate feedback. We launch campaigns, watch the numbers, optimize, and evaluate results.
While that process is valuable, it can also lead us to favor tactics that generate easily measurable actions over those that influence consumer behavior in less direct ways.
A consumer may see an advertisement several times before purchasing a product. They may never visit the brand’s website or consciously remember seeing the ad when they reach for the product at the grocery store.
But that doesn’t mean the advertising had no influence.
If we evaluate every campaign solely on clicks or immediately attributable conversions, we risk undervaluing the channels that build recognition, preference, and long-term brand growth.
That doesn’t mean awareness campaigns should get a free pass on accountability. We should establish meaningful KPIs and continually evaluate whether our investments are moving the brand in the right direction.
We just need to recognize that not every valuable outcome can be captured in a single dashboard.
It Starts With the Right Questions
Effective digital media planning for food and beverage brands should begin with an understanding of the business.
Are we entering a new market? Supporting expanded retail distribution? Promoting a new product? Encouraging trial? Defending market share?
Each objective requires a different strategy and definition of success.
The strongest media plans bring awareness and performance together rather than treating them as competing priorities.
At the end of the day, food and beverage brands aren’t advertising simply to generate clicks, impressions, or website visits. They’re advertising to build brands, influence purchase decisions, and ultimately sell more products.
Our job as media strategists is to connect those objectives to the right channels, audiences, and measures of success.
Because when the purchase happens in the grocery aisle, we need to look beyond the click to understand the real value of our advertising.