Ecommerce – Franck Nlemba

The Canadian Retail Media Opportunity You’re Ignoring

Canadian retailers are sitting on a goldmine of shopper data. Brands that figure this out first will win. Everyone else will keep guessing on Instagram.

By Franck Nlemba
April 2026
8 min read

There’s a C$3.7 billion market in Canada that most brand marketers are still treating as an afterthought. Retail media. And if you’re still pouring the majority of your media budget into social platforms hoping the algorithm will show your ad to someone who might buy your product, we need to talk.

Here’s the truth. Social media platforms don’t know who actually bought your product. They know who clicked. They know who watched 3 seconds of your video. But they don’t know who walked into a Loblaws, picked up your SKU, and put it in their cart. Retailers do.

And that distinction changes everything about how you should be spending your money.

Retail media in Canada isn’t coming. It’s here. It’s growing at nearly 20% year over year. By 2028, it’ll be a C$6 billion channel. The question isn’t whether retail media matters. It’s whether you’re going to move fast enough to get the best positioning before your competitors do.

C$3.7B
Canadian retail media
ad spend in 2025

20%
Share of all digital
ad dollars

74%
North American marketers
increasing RMN spend

Sources: eMarketer Canada Retail Media 2025; Nielsen 2025 Annual Marketing Report (n=1,400 global marketers)

The Three Players You Need to Know

Canada’s retail media landscape isn’t as fragmented as the U.S. market. That’s actually good news. It means you can cover a massive portion of Canadian shoppers by working with three major networks. Each one offers something different.

Loblaw

Loblaw Advance

18M+ PC Optimum members
2,400+ retail stores
1B+ yearly transactions
11M+ unique monthly digital visitors
Closed-loop sales measurement
Multi-touch attribution (launched 2025)
In-store digital screens in 500+ locations

Walmart Canada

Walmart Connect Canada

#1 omnichannel retailer in Canada
Sponsored search + display on walmart.ca
Off-site targeting via DSP partners
In-store TV walls and self-checkout ads
AI-powered campaign optimization
Social integrations with Meta and TikTok
Self-service and managed campaigns

Amazon Canada

Amazon Ads

~75% of Canadian retail media spend
Sponsored Products, Brands, and Display
Amazon DSP for off-platform targeting
Prime Video ads (CTV)
Deep purchase and browsing data
Most mature self-service tools
Full-funnel from awareness to conversion

Sources: Loblaw Advance official data; eMarketer Canada Retail Media 2024; Mars United Retail Media Report Card Canada, Spring 2025; Walmart Connect Canada

Why Brands Should Move Budget from Social Platforms to Retailers

I’ve seen this firsthand. A CPG brand spends $500K on Instagram and Facebook over a quarter. The platform report says they reached 4 million people. Engagement rate looks healthy. The marketing team presents the numbers and everyone nods. But when you ask the simple question, “How many units did we actually sell from this campaign?” the room goes quiet.

That’s the gap. And it’s enormous.

The data problem with social media

Social platforms are built on interest signals. They know what you liked, what you commented on, what you scrolled past. But they don’t know what you bought at the grocery store last Tuesday. They can’t tell you whether the person who saw your ad is a loyal buyer of your competitor’s brand. They definitely can’t tell you if your campaign drove first-time buyers or just reminded existing customers to buy what they were going to buy anyway.

Retail media flips this on its head. When you run a campaign through Loblaw Advance, your ad is being served to people based on what they’ve actually purchased. Not what they “liked.” Not what hashtag they followed. What they put in their cart and paid for.

Let’s be honest

If 80% of consumer spending still happens in store (eMarketer, 2024), then why are 90% of your ad dollars going to platforms that can’t see inside a store? The math doesn’t add up.

Closed-loop measurement isn’t a buzzword. It’s the whole point.

When Nielsen surveyed 1,400 global marketers for their 2025 Annual Marketing Report, 65% said retail media networks would play a bigger role in their media strategy this year. In North America specifically, that number hit 74%. The reason? Closed-loop attribution. You spend money. The retailer tracks who saw your ad. Then they match it to actual in-store and online purchases. You get a real number. Not an estimated conversion. A real one.

Here’s what that looks like in practice with Loblaw Advance. They take the ad exposure data and match it against PC Optimum transaction records across 2,400+ stores. They can show you sales lift, return on ad spend, and whether you drove first-time buyers or increased basket size. No guesswork. No modelling. Actual receipts.

Walmart Connect does this too. Their first-party signals connect online ad exposure to both e-commerce and in-store purchases. And with 95% of shoppers who add items to their Walmart cart completing a purchase within a week, the intent signal is off the charts.

Social media vs. retail media: where your money works harder

Capability	Social Media	Retail Media
Targeting based on actual purchases	✗	✓
Closed-loop sales attribution	✗	✓
Measures in-store sales lift	✗	✓
First-time buyer tracking	✗	✓
Privacy-compliant first-party data	Partial (declining)	✓
Reaches shoppers at point of purchase	✗	✓
Upper-funnel brand awareness	✓	Growing (CTV, off-site)
Cost to reach verified buyers	High (broad audiences)	Lower (precision targeting)

I’m not saying kill your social budget tomorrow. Social still does things retail media can’t, especially for broad awareness and community building. But if you’re a CPG brand spending 70% of your digital budget on Meta and TikTok and 5% on retail media, your allocation is backwards. In my experience, the brands getting the best results are running a 40/30/30 split: social for awareness, retail media for conversion and measurement, and search for intent capture.

“Customers who shop in-store and on PC Express spend about 26% more than customers who only shop in our stores. Speaking to the most valuable customers starts online.”
Lauren Steinberg, SVP Digital, Loyalty Media, Loblaw Companies

Real-World ExampleDanone Canada had a problem. A product recall on their plant-based milk cost them roughly 45,000 customers. Those shoppers didn’t just stop buying the product. They switched to competitors. And they were staying there.

Danone went to Loblaw Advance with one objective: win those people back. The Advance team used PC Optimum data to find exactly who those 45,000 lapsed customers were. They figured out what those shoppers were buying instead, whether they were premium or discount buyers, and how active they were on the app.

Then they built a targeted campaign: the right creative, the right offer, the right channel for each customer segment. The result? They didn’t just meet Danone’s recovery target. They beat it.

Try doing that with a Facebook lookalike audience.

Source: Grocery Business Magazine, “From App to Aisle: The Rise of Loblaw Advance,” December 2025

The cookie is crumbling. First-party data isn’t.

Here’s the other big shift. Third-party cookies are going away. Safari and Firefox already blocked them. Even though Google reversed its Chrome deprecation plan, consumer behavior has moved on. According to eMarketer, 38% of U.S. consumers accept cookies less frequently than they did three years ago. Privacy regulations in Canada, PIPEDA and its provincial counterparts, are getting stricter.

Social platforms are losing the targeting precision they once had. Apple’s ATT framework gutted Facebook’s ability to track conversions across apps. The signal loss is real, and it’s permanent.

Retailers don’t have this problem. Their data is first-party. It comes from loyalty programs, purchase transactions, and direct customer relationships. PC Optimum has 18 million+ members. That’s not a sample. That’s nearly half the country’s population. And every transaction is logged, permissioned, and tied to a real person.

What I tell my team is this: bet on the channel that owns its data, not the channel that’s borrowing someone else’s.

Why Brands Should Connect Their CRM to Retailers

This is the part most brands haven’t figured out yet. And honestly, it’s where the biggest competitive advantage sits right now.

Most brands have a CRM full of customer data. Email addresses, purchase history, engagement scores, subscription status. But that data sits in a silo. It tells you what happened on your own website or your own DTC channel. It can’t tell you what your customers are doing when they walk into a Walmart or shop on amazon.ca.

Now imagine connecting those two worlds.

Your Brand CRM
Emails, segments, purchase history

→

Data Clean Room
Privacy-safe matching

→

Retailer Data
In-store purchases, basket data

→

Activated Campaigns
Precision targeting + measurement

Data clean rooms make this possible (and legal)

In 2025, nearly 66% of organizations were using data clean rooms in some form for retail media. A clean room lets you upload your CRM data and match it against a retailer’s purchase data without either side seeing the other’s raw information. It’s privacy-compliant, it’s secure, and it answers questions you literally cannot answer any other way.

Questions like:

What a CRM + Retailer data connection unlocks

Are my DTC customers also buying from me at Loblaws? If yes, you’ve got a loyal cross-channel buyer. If no, there’s an expansion opportunity sitting right there.

Which of my CRM segments are showing up in competitor aisles? Your loyalty tier data combined with retailer category data can reveal defection patterns you’d never catch from your own data alone.

What does my customer’s full basket look like? Your CRM knows they buy your protein bars. The retailer knows they also buy almond milk, organic eggs, and pre-workout supplements. That’s a lifestyle profile you can’t build from email clicks.

The Loblaw Advance approach

Loblaw Advance can segment audiences by actual shopping behaviour: spend level, category mix, lifestyle signals, and purchase recency. They can tell you whether a customer’s last trip was a quick stock-up or a full weekly shop. They can distinguish between a premium beauty buyer and a discount grocery shopper, even when it’s the same person.

When Bell Media partnered with Loblaw Advance in late 2025, they created a closed-loop measurement solution for connected TV advertisers. The integration links Bell’s premium video inventory with Loblaw’s point-of-sale data. So a brand can run a CTV ad on Crave, then measure whether the people who saw it actually bought the product at a Loblaws store. That’s not a proxy metric. That’s proof.

And in September 2025, Loblaw Advance launched multi-touch attribution across their entire ecosystem. This means brands can now see how different touchpoints, from a sponsored product ad on the website to a PC Optimum offer on the app to an in-store digital screen, each contribute to a final purchase. One unified view. One source of truth.

Why “someday” is already too late

The brands that connect their CRM to retail media networks today are building a data asset that gets more valuable with every campaign. Every run teaches you more about your customers. Every match between your CRM and the retailer’s data sharpens your targeting. And every closed-loop result gives you the numbers to make the case for bigger budgets.

But there’s a first-mover advantage here. Clean room integrations take time to set up. Data matching requires alignment on taxonomies and identifiers. And once your competitor locks in preferred placements and custom audiences with a retailer, you’re fighting uphill.

According to eMarketer, 58% of U.S. ad buyers are prioritizing first-party data partnerships in 2025. In Canada, that trend is accelerating. The Mars United Retail Media Report Card rated nine Canadian networks across 99 performance criteria. The ones that scored highest? The ones investing most heavily in making it easier for brands to bring their own data to the table.

The Budget Shift: Where Smart Brands Are Moving

YESTERDAY’S MODEL

Meta / Facebook — 40%

Instagram — 30%

YouTube — 20%

TikTok 10%

Can’t measure real sales

→

TOMORROW’S MODEL

Retail Media — 40%

Social — 30%

Search — 20%

CTV 10%

Every dollar tied to a receipt

Illustrative budget allocation for Canadian CPG brands

The Bottom Line for Canadian Brands

Retail media in Canada is growing faster than any other digital ad channel. The 19.7% growth rate in 2025 was more than double the 8.8% growth in overall digital advertising. And over the five-year span leading to 2028, eMarketer forecasts a 134% gain in the channel overall.

The three retailers that matter most, Loblaws, Walmart, and Amazon, aren’t just selling ad space. They’re selling access to verified purchasers. They’re selling closed-loop measurement. They’re selling something social platforms simply can’t offer: proof that your ad drove a sale.

And when you connect your CRM to these networks, you stop marketing to personas and start marketing to real people. People whose purchase behaviour you can actually see, measure, and act on.

Three things to do this quarter

1. Audit your current spend. If retail media is under 15% of your digital budget, you’re underweight for a CPG brand in Canada.

2. Start a clean room pilot. Pick one retailer. Match your CRM. See what you learn. The insights will justify the investment.

3. Shift 10-15% of your social budget into retail media. Keep social for what it does best (awareness and community). Let retail media handle the work that matters most: proving that your advertising actually sells product.

Data Sources

eMarketer, “Canada Retail Media 2025,” February 2025
eMarketer, “Canada Retail Media 2024,” January 2024
eMarketer, “Retail Media is the Fastest-Growing Digital Advertising Channel at Scale in Canada,” February 2025
Nielsen, “2025 Annual Marketing Report: From Chaos to Clarity,” May 2025 (n=1,400 global marketers)
Nielsen, “The Future of Retail Media,” June 2025
Mars United Commerce, “Retail Media Report Card Canada, Spring 2025”
Loblaw Advance official data and press releases (loblawadvance.ca)
Bell Media & Loblaw Advance partnership announcement, December 2025
Loblaw Advance, “Multi-Touch Attribution Launch,” September 2025
Grocery Business Magazine, “From App to Aisle: The Rise of Loblaw Advance,” December 2025
Grand View Research, “Canada Retail Media Networks Market Size & Outlook, 2030”
Walmart Connect Canada (walmartconnect.ca)
ResearchAndMarkets / GlobeNewsWire, “Canada Digital Ad Spend Business Report 2026,” February 2026
eMarketer, “Walmart Connect Expands Social Capabilities,” April 2026
Wilkins Media, “The 2026 Canadian Marketing Trend Report,” March 2026
AI Digital, “Retail Media Networks: How They Work in 2026,” February 2026

The Full Funnel Isn’t a Digital Problem — It’s a Brand Opportunity

Digital Strategy · Brand Marketing · Retail Media

Why splitting “digital” from “brand” is costing companies sales they never knew they lost — and how to fix it.

By a Digital Director who’s tired of defending the funnel

I’ve been in this meeting more times than I can count. Someone looks at the digital spend line and says, “You’re putting money into retail ads. That only drives online sales.” It sounds logical. It feels reasonable. It’s also wrong. And the cost of believing it shows up in your numbers.

I know because I’m in that conversation every week. As a digital director, I spend a lot of time fighting a false divide: brand marketing on one side, digital performance on the other. This piece is my attempt to close it. With actual evidence.

Retail media gets dismissed as a bottom-of-funnel tool. It isn’t. It runs all three stages at once.

The Funnel Was Never Separate Channels

The purchase funnel was always a metaphor. Awareness at the top, consideration in the middle, conversion at the bottom. Simple enough. But then organizations did something the textbooks never intended: they built actual departments around those stages. Brand owned the top. Performance owned the bottom. And the middle? Nobody owned the middle.

The result is a mess. Brand budgets lost their connection to real outcomes. Performance budgets lost any sense of long-term equity. And digital, a channel that runs across all three stages at the same time, got shoved into the “performance only” bucket. Even when the data said otherwise.

“Digital media isn’t where brand goes to die. It’s where brand goes to prove it’s working.”
— The argument the industry keeps resisting

Retail Media Is Brand Media. Full Stop.

Take Walmart.ca. A brand runs a sponsored product or a display ad in that environment, and the instinct is to call it a sales move. You’re catching shoppers mid-browse and nudging them to convert. Sure, that’s one thing it does. But it isn’t the only thing. Not even close.

A shopper sees your brand at the top of a Walmart.ca search. They don’t buy. They browse, compare, and close the tab. You might call that a wasted impression. I’d call it a seeded consideration. That person just saw your brand in a high-trust environment. Walmart’s credibility rubbed off on yours. And the next time they’re standing in the aisle, that exposure is still working.

📣 Sees Your Sponsored Ad Brand impression in trusted context BRAND EXPOSURE

💭 Doesn’t Buy — Yet Memory encoded. Brand recalled later CONSIDERATION

🏪 Buys In-Store or Returns Online 60% of retail media impressions end here (Criteo, 2023) CONVERSION — ANYWHERE

The “digital spend” critics say only drives online sales — drives the sale regardless of where it happens.

Leaving without buying doesn’t mean the ad failed. That shopper carries your brand into the next store they walk into.

Case Study

L’Oréal Canada — Retail Media as Brand Builder

L’Oréal had a problem a lot of brands recognize: getting noticed in a crowded Canadian market, both online and off. They ran a campaign that blended retail ads with brand placements across e-commerce and physical stores. Shoppers who saw the digital component showed a 22% lift in brand recall compared to those who didn’t. Even among people who bought nothing. The following quarter, first-time buyers showed up in physical stores too. The digital placement wasn’t closing deals. It was opening doors.

The Numbers That Should End This Debate

70%of purchase decisions influenced by digital touchpoints before in-store purchase (Google/Ipsos)

3.5×higher conversion when brand awareness precedes performance media exposure (Nielsen)

60%of retail media impressions end in an in-store purchase, not online (Criteo)

$45Bprojected retail media ad spend in North America by 2026 — driven largely by brand goals (eMarketer)

Stop at that third number. Sixty percent of retail ads end in an in-store purchase. Not online. In the store. So when someone tells you digital spend only moves the needle online, they’re dismissing the majority of what they’re actually paying for. That’s not a rounding error. That’s the whole story.

The Real Problem: Brand Has Been Diluted Into Digital

Here’s the truth. Over the past decade, brand budgets didn’t disappear. They moved. Under pressure to justify every dollar, CMOs pulled money out of TV, print, and OOH and pushed it into programmatic, paid social, and search. They called it efficiency. What actually happened is that brand thinking got stripped out of those investments. The channel changed. The strategy didn’t follow.

Digital spend went up. Brand equity went down. Not because digital doesn’t work. Because nobody brought the brand thinking with them when they made the move.

“We didn’t move brand into digital. We replaced brand with digital, and then wondered why our awareness scores were flat.”
— A pattern repeated across virtually every major CPG category

Case Study

P&G’s Reversal — A Lesson in Reclaiming Brand Within Digital

In 2017, P&G made headlines by cutting $200M in digital spend. Too narrow. Too targeted. Diminishing returns. Two years later, they came back quietly. But the briefs were different this time: brand-first creative, longer formats, awareness objectives written in from day one. By 2019, they posted 7% organic sales growth and brand equity scores were climbing. What changed wasn’t the channel. It was the thinking they brought to it.

New-to-Brand Is a Digital KPI. It Should Be a Brand KPI Too.

Amazon, Walmart Connect, Kroger Precision Marketing: they all show you natively how many of your sales came from first-time buyers. Not modeled. Not inferred. Actual people who had never bought your brand before. That’s brand acquisition. Sitting in your dashboard right now.

BRAND RECALL LIFT +22% vs. unexposed shoppers AWARENESS KPI

IN-STORE VELOCITY +14% 4 weeks post-campaign OFFLINE IMPACT KPI

REPEAT PURCHASE AFTER 1ST EXPOSURE 2.3× vs. non-exposed baseline LOYALTY KPI

These metrics live natively inside Walmart Connect, Amazon DSP, and Kroger 84.51° — they are brand metrics inside a digital platform. Brand acquisition is now measurable in real time. The excuse “we can’t prove brand ROI” no longer applies.

These aren’t vanity metrics from a third-party study. They live inside the same dashboard as your ROAS. Brand KPIs and performance KPIs, side by side.

Case Study

A Mid-Sized Canadian Snack Brand on Walmart Connect

A snack brand nobody had heard of wanted to break into Walmart. They had six weeks and a modest budget. Here’s what happened. They ran sponsored products and display ads on Walmart.ca, targeting shoppers who’d never bought their brand before. Of total campaign sales, 68% came from first-time buyers. And in the four weeks after it ended, in-store sales at Walmart locations climbed 14%. People had seen the brand online and gone looking for it on the shelf. That’s not a digital campaign. That’s a brand-building campaign that happened to run digitally.

How to Fix the Conversation Inside Your Organization

Key Principles for Digital Directors Navigating This Debate

Stop defending the channel. Start reporting on outcomes. Don’t show up to brand reviews talking about CTRs and ROAS. Show up with awareness lift, consideration scores, and first-time buyer rates. The moment brand KPIs appear in a digital report, the conversation changes.
Show the in-store halo. Every time. Pull the geo-level store data that lines up with your digital campaign windows. In my experience, the lift is almost always there. Brick-and-mortar sales follow digital reach far more consistently than brand teams are willing to admit.
Brand goes in the brief. Not in the post-mortem. What I tell my team: every digital placement needs to carry a brand idea, even if it’s a banner. A Walmart.ca ad should feel like the same brand as your TV spot. Smaller canvas, same idea.
Use the platform’s own data to make the case. First-time buyer metrics, category share of voice, repeat purchase rate after first exposure: these live inside Walmart Connect, Amazon DSP, and Kroger 84.51°. Bring them to your brand reviews. Let them do the talking.
The 60/40 rule isn’t just for traditional media. Binet & Field are clear: roughly 60% of investment should go toward long-term brand building, 40% toward short-term conversion. Digital can serve both halves. But only if the objectives are set that way from the start.

60/40 isn’t anti-digital. It’s a framework. And digital can serve both halves of it, if you brief it that way.

The Opportunity Nobody Is Claiming

Here’s the opportunity nobody’s talking about. The most underused person in marketing today isn’t someone with a new technical skill. It’s someone who speaks both brand and digital fluently. Most organizations have split these disciplines so far apart that a person who can actually bridge them is rare. And genuinely hard to replace.

Full-funnel thinking isn’t empire-building. It’s just paying attention. Shoppers don’t turn off brand awareness when they open a browser. They don’t skip a Walmart.ca ad because they’re planning to buy in store. The journey is seamless on their end. Our media plans are the ones with all the walls in them. And that’s the problem we need to fix.

The marketing director who’s skeptical of digital isn’t irrational. They’ve watched a decade of spend get poorly explained and even more poorly measured. That skepticism is earned. But the answer isn’t to split the disciplines further apart. It’s to build a shared language for what brand success actually looks like, wherever it happens.

The full funnel isn’t a digital problem. It’s a brand opportunity that happens to live in digital spaces. The organizations that figure that out first won’t just win online. They’ll win in every aisle, on every shelf, in every market where their customers are making decisions. Which, these days, is everywhere.

Beyond Traffic: Why Chasing Visitors Won’t Necessarily Boost Your Bottom Line

Many entrepreneurs equate website traffic with success. The logic seems straightforward: more visitors should mean more customers and higher sales. But in reality, high traffic does not guarantee high sales – especially when conversion rates are abysmally low. In fact, average website conversion rates hover around just 1–3%, meaning roughly 98 out of 100 visitors take no actionwordstream.comwordstream.com.

This conversion gap indicates that most traffic is merely window shopping. At the same time, the cost to acquire that traffic has been rising sharply, eating into marketing ROI. Paradoxically, some businesses are now seeing less traffic but more sales – a trend that challenges long-held assumptions about digital growth.

In this report, we’ll explore why focusing solely on traffic acquisition can be a costly mistake. We’ll back this up with data – from low global conversion rates to surging customer acquisition costs – and highlight insights from industry leaders (like Rand Fishkin) who observe that declining traffic can coincide with rising revenue. We’ll examine real examples (e.g. HubSpot’s recent experience) and the changing landscape of search, where Google’s AI summaries and “zero-click” results often bypass websites altogether.

The 2% Reality: Traffic Without Conversions

For most websites, only a tiny fraction of visitors ever convert into customers or leads. Numerous studies put average conversion rates in the low single digits. For example, WordStream data shows the average e-commerce conversion rate is about 1.91%. Similarly, industry benchmark reports find median conversion rates around 1–2% in many sectors (e.g. median fashion retail conversion ~1.96%). In other words, over 98% of web visitors typically don’t buy or sign up.

Such low conversion efficiency means that pouring more and more people into the top of the funnel yields diminishing returns. If only 2 in 100 visitors make a purchase, getting 1,000 more visitors might only produce 20 sales – and that’s if they are quality visits. As marketing expert Brendan Hufford observed, chasing big traffic numbers often leads to a false sense of success. He recounted a “nightmare” scenario where vanity metrics took over: his team celebrated spikes in blog hits even though those visits (to articles like “What is an SDR?” and “How to become a life coach”) were largely irrelevant to their product and converted no one.

They became “addicted to numbers that meant nothing,” ultimately optimizing for pageviews instead of paying customers.

This cautionary tale underscores that more traffic can be worse than no traffic at all if it’s untargeted – it wastes resources and attention on people who will never buy, while distorting your KPIs.

In short, a big Google Analytics session count is not a business goal – sales and leads are. If your conversion rate is 1%, doubling traffic might double your problems (server costs, bounce rates, irrelevant inquiries) without meaningfully moving revenue.

Rather than fixate on filling the funnel, smart entrepreneurs assess how well their website persuades visitors. Increasing the conversion rate from 1% to 2% is far more impactful than increasing traffic by another thousand hits. The data makes it clear: traffic for traffic’s sake is a dead end if those visitors aren’t taking action.

Rising Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC) Squeeze ROI

Not only do most visitors not convert – getting those visitors is becoming more expensive. Digital marketers have watched the cost of customer acquisition climb year after year, especially in paid channels. Recent benchmarks illustrate this trend starkly. According to 2024 Google Ads industry data, the average cost per click (CPC) rose to about $4.66 – up ~10% from $4.22 the year prior (and higher than ~$4.01 in 2022).

More importantly, the average cost per lead (CPL) has ballooned: by late 2023 it averaged $66.69 across industries, a 25% increase from the year before (Just two years earlier, in 2022, the average CPL was around $44, implying roughly 50% higher lead acquisition costs now than in 2022.

To put these numbers in perspective, below is a summary of recent cost trends for Google search advertising:

Average Google Ads Costs (All Industries)linkedin.com

Metric	2022 Average	2023 Average	2024 Average
Cost per Click (CPC)	$4.01	$4.22	$4.66
Cost per Lead (CPL)	$44.70	$53.52	$66.69

Table: Steady rise in paid search costs from 2022–2024 (data from LocaliQ/WordStream benchmark report)linkedin.com.

This means marketers are paying more for each visitor and each lead than ever before. If your website’s conversion rate isn’t improving in tandem, your cost to acquire a customer (CAC) is shooting up.

For example, if it cost $50 in ads to get one purchase last year, it might cost $60–$70 now for the same outcome. Indeed, a search ad trends report noted CPLs rose in the majority of industries (+25% on average) even as conversion rates declined in many sectors. The result is a pincer movement on ROI: higher ad spend yielding fewer conversions.

Meanwhile, platforms like Google are reporting record profits, indicating that advertisers are pouring in budgets to compete for clicks. Competition drives up bids, and automation (like Google’s automated bidding) often skews toward higher spends.

A 2024 analysis found Google’s search ad costs had surged 133% year-over-year in some cases, with certain retail sectors experiencing a 40–50% increase in ad prices over five yearsbubbleup.net. These increases far outstrip inflation, reflecting how much costlier it has become to simply maintain the same traffic levels via paid acquisition.

The takeaway for entrepreneurs is sobering: buying traffic is an increasingly expensive game. If you’re dumping more budget into Google or social ads expecting to fuel growth, be aware that the efficiency of that spend is likely diminishing. When clicks cost dollars and most clicks don’t convert, chasing traffic can burn through cash fast. This is why many marketing leaders now emphasize improving conversion and customer value over just driving more visits. As we’ll discuss, investing in understanding your audience and tailoring your offer can yield better ROI than blindly upping ad spend to hit vanity traffic goals.

Traffic Down, Revenue Up: Decoupling Visits from Sales

For decades, we assumed a strong positive correlation between website traffic and sales – more visitors in the funnel meant more buyers out the other end. Recently, however, a “deeply strange trend” has emerged where the two have become unbound. In example after example, businesses are reporting situations where traffic is falling but revenue is rising. This isn’t a fluke; it’s a sign of changing user behavior and marketing effectiveness beyond raw clicks.

Perhaps the most prominent case is HubSpot. The popular B2B software company saw a dramatic drop in its blog traffic in 2023–2024 – losing millions of monthly Google visits. An analysis estimated HubSpot’s organic blog traffic fell on the order of 50–80%, from around 13 million visits at its peak down to a few million in late 2024. Yet, in that same period, HubSpot’s business thrived. HubSpot’s annual revenue grew ~22% year-over-year to reach about $2.5 billion in 2024 with strong gains in customer count and an all-time high stock price.

How is this possible?

It seems that much of the lost traffic was to top-of-funnel blog posts (e.g. generic how-tos and definitional articles) that weren’t directly tied to their core products’ purchase intent. In other words, HubSpot’s SEO team had built massive traffic on broadly popular topics, but those visitors were largely non-buyers. When Google’s algorithm later redirected those informational queries to sites like Canva, Wikipedia, or others HubSpot’s visitor numbers dropped – yet their real customers still found them through other means. The people who genuinely needed HubSpot’s software were now discovering it via brand reputation, word-of-mouth, and targeted content, rather than through random blog hits.

Moving Beyond Traffic: What To Focus on Instead

If not traffic, what should growth-minded businesses concentrate on? Below are key strategies – each a more sustainable driver of revenue than raw traffic numbers:

Understand Your Audience’s Behavior : Invest in market research and audience insights. Learn who your best customers are, where they spend time, and what truly motivates them. This could mean using tools to analyze audience demographics and interests, conducting surveys/interviews, or engaging in online communities to observe discussions. The goal is to meet your audience on their terms. By understanding their behavior, you can position your marketing where it actually resonates. When you know what your customers care about, you can create content and offers that naturally attract them (often without needing massive ad spend). This customer-centric approach ensures you’re driving quality visits the kind that convert; instead of chasing everyone and hoping someone is interested.

Improve Offer–Audience Fit (Conversion Optimization, rather than throwing more prospects at a mediocre offer, make your offer more compelling to those who are already finding you. This is essentially conversion rate optimization and product-market fit alignment. Analyze why the 98% aren’t converting: Is it the messaging? The pricing? By addressing objections, you can lift your conversion rate (even modest gains from 1% to 2% double your sales with the same traffic). Ensure that your marketing promises align with the experience on your site. Remove friction from the user journey. It’s also about targeting: if you attract a slightly smaller but more qualified audience, your conversion rate will improve.
Offer-audience fit means the right people seeing the right message. When you achieve that, you need not worry about pouring in huge volumes of traffic; the business scales efficiently because a larger share of visitors say “yes.”
Leverage Local Marketing. For businesses with any local or regional component, local marketing can be a high-conversion alternative to broad online traffic. This includes local SEO (optimizing for “near me” searches, Google Maps, etc.), community involvement, and offline-online integration. Ensuring your Google Business profile is robust, encouraging reviews, and appearing in local directories can drive ready-to-buy customers straight to your door (or website). Additionally, sponsoring local events or partnering with local organizations can boost word-of-mouth.
Embrace Event Marketing and Direct Engagement. In-person and virtual events (webinars, workshops, conferences, meetups) can cultivate deeper relationships with prospects than a drive-by website visit. Events have a way of attracting highly interested audiences and immersing them in your brand or product experience. Whether it’s hosting a live webinar or networking at a trade show, events create opportunities for dialogue, trust-building, and immediate feedback that static web traffic cannot match. Even smaller-scale events like roundtable discussions or AMA (Ask Me Anything) sessions can yield a rich crop of leads.
Build Your Brand with Content & Storytelling – Instead of churning out SEO-optimized posts for traffic, shift to brand content that tells a story and builds an emotional connection. Strong branding and storytelling increase customer loyalty and willingness to buy. Focus on creating content that conveys your mission, showcases customer success stories, and provides genuine value. This might be thought leadership articles, video series, podcasts, or social media narratives formats that may not always go viral in terms of traffic, but engage the right people and differentiate your brand. Good storytelling also spreads via word-of-mouth. When people feel a connection to your brand, they become ambassadors, mentioning you in conversations (online and offline).

Over time, a strong brand reduces your reliance on paid traffic, as customers come to you proactively because they trust what you stand for.

In practical terms, this means allocate resources to content marketing, PR, and social media presence that reinforce your story, rather than just running another lead-gen campaign. Brand equity might be hard to measure in Google Analytics, but it shows up in the bank balance through higher conversion rates, repeat business, and resilience to competition.

Franck NLEMBA

Sources:

Fishkin, R. “Traffic Is Down; Revenue Is… Up?” SparkToro Blog. Jan 27, 2025 sparktoro.com
Reynolds, W. “Why 2020’s SEO KPIs Won’t Work in 2024…” Seer Interactive. Sep 23, 2024seerinteractive
Ad Costs: LocaliQ (via Search Engine Journal) 2024 Google Ads Benchmarks linkedin.com; BubbleUp Marketing, Oct 24, 2024. bubbleup.net.
Local Search Stat: Think with Google, 2019 report on local search behavior. lionssharedm.com.
Event Marketing ROI: Splash survey via ExplodingTopics, 2023. explodingtopics.com.
Brand Storytelling Stats: CXL 2023 via HuddleCreative. huddlecreative.com.

Au-delà du trafic : pourquoi courir après les visiteurs ne boostera pas forcément votre résultat net

De nombreux entrepreneurs associent le trafic d’un site web à la réussite. La logique semble simple : plus de visiteurs devraient signifier plus de clients et des ventes accrues.

Pourtant, un trafic élevé ne garantit pas un chiffre d’affaires important; notamment quand les taux de conversion sont très faibles. En effet, les taux de conversion moyens se situent autour de 1 % à 3 %, ce qui signifie qu’environ 98 visiteurs sur 100 ne réalisent aucune action utile pour l’entreprise.

Cette faille de conversion suggère que la plupart des visites relèvent de la simple consultation. Parallèlement, le coût pour acquérir ce trafic a fortement augmenté, réduisant la rentabilité des campagnes. Fait paradoxal, certaines entreprises observent désormais une baisse de trafic tout en voyant leurs ventes progresser. Ce phénomène remet en cause les idées reçues sur la croissance digitale.

Prenons l’exemple de la fête des mères au Canada. Le marketeur de base pour attirer des ventes en ligne aura coutume de regarder les mots clés les plus recherchés. Il va utiliser des outils de recherche de mots clés. Mais très rarement il va considérer YouTube, Reddit, Quora ou même Pinterest dans les plateformes à analyser. Et pourtant une analyse sur un échantillon de 5K personnes au Canada démontre bien que ces plateformes sont populaires auprès des mamans.

These social networks are used more/less than the global average by people with mom in their profile in Canada

Tout comme il ne va certainement pas réaliser que la mise a jour des conditions de livraisons sur les pages de produit est probablement l’action la plus importante pour la conversion!

La réalité des 2 % : un trafic sans conversions

Pour la plupart des sites, seule une infime fraction des visiteurs se transforme en clients ou en prospects qualifiés. Plusieurs études placent les taux de conversion moyens en dessous de 3 %. Par exemple, WordStream indique que le taux de conversion moyen du e-commerce est d’environ 1,91 %. De même, des rapports sectoriels font état de taux de conversion médian autour de 1–2 % dans de nombreux domaines (p. ex. mode : ~1,96 %).

L’erreur classique est de célébrer les pics de trafic même lorsque ces visites n’ont aucun lien avec votre offre. Comme l’a relaté Brendan Hufford, son équipe est devenue « accro à des chiffres qui ne signifiaient rien » :

ils se félicitaient d’articles génériques (« Qu’est-ce qu’un SDR ? », « Comment devenir coach de vie ? ») qui drainaient beaucoup de visites… mais aucun acheteur. Ils optimisaient pour des pages vues au lieu de vrais clients, gaspillant temps et budget sur un trafic peu qualifié.

Si votre taux de conversion est de 1 %, doubler votre trafic ne fera peut-être que doubler votre coût sans doubler vos ventes. Avant de chercher plus de visiteurs, assurez-vous que votre site sait convertir ceux que vous avez déjà.

Augmentation des coûts d’acquisition client (CAC) et pression sur le ROI

Acquérir du trafic devient également plus onéreux. Entre 2022 et 2024, les coûts des campagnes Google Ads ont flambé :

Métrique	Moyenne 2022	Moyenne 2023	Moyenne 2024
Coût par clic (CPC)	4,01 $	4,22 $	4,66 $
Coût par prospect (CPL)	44,70 $	53,52 $	66,69 $

Tableau : augmentation régulière des coûts de recherche payante de 2022 à 2024 (données LocaliQ/WordStream).

Résultat : vous payez plus pour chaque visiteur et chaque lead. Si votre taux de conversion n’augmente pas également, votre coût d’acquisition client s’envole.

Par exemple, un achat qui coûtait 50 $ en publicité peut désormais coûter 60–70 $. Et alors que Google affiche des bénéfices record, votre budget se dilue dans la concurrence des enchères automatiques et des CPC à la hausse. En savoir plus sur l’inflation des coûts publicitaires ici

Trafic en baisse, chiffre d’affaires en hausse : dissocier visites et ventes

Il se produit aujourd’hui un phénomène étrange : certaines entreprises voient leur trafic chuter tout en voyant leurs revenus grimper. Le cas le plus emblématique est HubSpot :

Entre 2023 et 2024, HubSpot a perdu des millions de visites mensuelles organiques sur son blog (– 50 % à – 80 % selon Ahrefs).
Pourtant, sur la même période, son chiffre d’affaires annuel a cru de ~22 % pour atteindre 2,5 milliards de dollars en 2024, avec un nombre de clients au plus haut historique et une action en bourse en progression constante.

Comment l’expliquer ? HubSpot a d’abord construit énormément de trafic sur des articles génériques, peu liés à l’intention d’achat. Quand Google a redirigé ces requêtes vers des sources plus spécialisées (Canva, Wikipédia…), HubSpot a perdu ces visites « vanity » sans que cela n’impacte ses ventes réelles. Or, les acheteurs ayant une intention claire trouvent toujours HubSpot par sa réputation, le bouche-à-oreille ou son contenu ciblé.

Ils ne sont pas seuls : Wil Reynolds (Seer Interactive) observe que son trafic Google en 2024 est 41 % en dessous de son pic de 2020, sans pour autant voir s’effondrer ses leads ni son chiffre d’affaires. Comme le rappelle Rand Fishkin,

« l’influence, pas le trafic, doit devenir la métrique principale » dans ce nouveau contexte.

Le nouveau paysage numérique : réponses IA et recherches sans clic

La dissociation trafic/ventes s’explique par les évolutions des comportements de recherche :

Recherches « sans clic » – Google propose de plus en plus de réponses directement dans la page de résultats (featured snippets, knowledge panels, réponses générées par IA), éliminant le besoin de cliquer sur un site.
Visibilité hors-site – réseaux sociaux, forums, outils d’IA (ChatGPT, Bing Chat…) et plateformes communautaires (LinkedIn, Reddit, YouTube…) sont désormais des lieux clés de découverte, mais renvoient peu de trafic dans les analytics classiques.

Par exemple, un internaute cherchant « meilleur CRM » peut lire un résumé IA de Google mentionnant HubSpot sans cliquer sur le lien du site. HubSpot gagne alors en notoriété sans augmenter ses sessions web directes. De même, SparkToro montre qu’un post LinkedIn sans lien externe obtient 10× plus de portée qu’un post avec lien, ce qui génère beaucoup d’engagement hors site – et donc autant de pistes influentes sans apparaître comme trafic référent.

En somme, votre influence – mentions, avis, recommandations, contenus sur d’autres plateformes et références IA – devient souvent plus déterminante que vos pages vues.

Aller au-delà du trafic : sur quoi se concentrer à la place

Pour générer une croissance durable, privilégiez ces axes plutôt que la simple acquisition de visites :

Comprendre le comportement de votre audience
Menez enquêtes, analyses démographiques et veille des communautés en ligne. Identifiez où se trouvent vos clients idéaux, ce qui les motive et comment ils consomment l’information. Comme l’affirme Rand Fishkin,

« comprendre le comportement de son audience est plus crucial que jamais ». Cette connaissance vous permet de cibler des canaux et des messages réellement efficaces.

Optimiser l’adéquation offre–audience (CRO/P-M fit)
Plutôt que de toucher une audience plus large, faites en sorte que votre offre soit irrésistible pour ceux qui vous trouvent déjà : affinez vos messages, testez vos pages (A/B testing), supprimez les frictions du parcours client. Passer d’un taux de conversion de 1 % à 2 % double vos ventes pour le même trafic.
Exploiter le marketing local
Pour les acteurs régionaux, le local génère un fort taux de conversion : 76 % des internautes effectuant une recherche « près de moi » sur mobile visitent un commerce dans la journée, et 28 % d’entre eux réalisent un achat. Travaillez votre référencement local, optimisez votre fiche Google Business et encouragez les avis.
Adopter le marketing événementiel et l’engagement direct
Webinaires, ateliers, salons ou rencontres en ligne créent un lien humain et captent une audience hautement qualifiée. Selon une enquête Splash, 47 % des marketeurs jugent que les événements en présentiel offrent le ROI le plus élevé de tous les canaux, et la plupart les considèrent comme essentiels à la croissance.
Construire votre marque avec du contenu et du storytelling
Le storytelling émotionnel peut augmenter les conversions de 96 % et créer une valeur client à long terme 3× supérieure pour les clients liés émotionnellement à la marque. Investissez dans des récits clients, des vidéos, des podcasts ou des séries d’articles qui suscitent l’adhésion et encouragent le bouche-à-oreille.

Il est temps de rompre avec l’obsession du trafic. En 2025, la croissance durable repose sur l’engagement ciblé plutôt que sur l’injection massive de visiteurs. Les taux de conversion moyens très bas et la montée des coûts publicitaires rendent la course au trafic coûteuse et inefficace. Parallèlement, de grandes entreprises prouvent qu’on peut perdre des visiteurs tout en gagnant des ventes, en misant sur l’influence, la réputation et l’expérience client.

Pour votre entreprise, concentrez-vous sur :

La compréhension fine de votre audience.
L’optimisation de votre offre pour ceux qui vous trouvent déjà.
Des canaux à fort impact (local, événements, storytelling).

Ainsi, vous maximiserez votre retour sur investissement et verrez vos ventes progresser – même si votre trafic n’augmente pas.

Sources :

Fishkin, R. « Traffic Is Down; Revenue Is… Up? » SparkToro Blog. 27 janvier 2025.
Hufford, B. Publication LinkedIn sur le trafic vanity vs clients réels.
Reynolds, W. « Why 2020’s SEO KPIs Won’t Work in 2024… » Seer Interactive. 23 septembre 2024.
Taux de conversion : WordStream, Conversion Rate Benchmarks; Capturly/IRP Commerce (via Growcode).
Coûts publicitaires : LocaliQ (via Search Engine Journal) 2024 Google Ads Benchmarks; BubbleUp Marketing, 24 octobre 2024.
Trafic vs chiffre d’affaires HubSpot : analyse SparkToro; Invezz finance news.
Recherches sans clic & IA : exemple SparkToro/Google.
Statistiques recherche locale : Think with Google, rapport 2019 sur la recherche locale.
ROI événementiel : enquête Splash via ExplodingTopics, 2023.
Storytelling émotionnel : CXL 2023 via HuddleCreative.

Amazon Prime ou le succès de la fidélisation en Marketing

Connaissez vous le programme Amazon prime?

En février 2005, Amazon lançait le programme PRIME en misant sur la livraison rapide de millions d’articles. Le pari de la compagnie à l’époque était clairement de faciliter l’expérience d’achat en ligne. En effet les magasins physiques avaient pour avantage de proposer un modèle sans livraison. Tu vas en magasin, tu achètes une robe ou un jeans, tu rentres avec le produit chez toi, pas besoin d’attendre la livraison. Ce programme apportait donc un bénéfice direct à la vente en ligne en réduisant au maximum les freins à l’achat. Si le produit n’est pas très onéreux et si la livraison est rapide, le consommateur est heureux. C’était le pari et 11 ans plus tard les chiffres donnent raison à AMAZON.

Nombre de membres Amazon Prime

La progression folle des marchands du programme PRIME est une leçon pour toutes les marques qui se lancent dans la fidélisation. En effet au 3e trimestre 2016, le programme PRIME avait 49.5 millions de membres aux USA selon la firme Cowen & Co soit 23% de plus qu’au troisième trimestre 2015.

Les membres Prime font plus de commandes sur AMAZON que les non-membres. En octobre 2016, 57% des commandes passées sur AMAZON étaient le fait des membres “Prime”. Ils étaient seulement 49% en 2015. Etatnt donné que 50% des produits vendus sur AMAZON proviennent des autres marchands, petits entrepreneurs Amazon a étendu son programme FBA à ces denriers afin de faciliter la vente et la livraison de produits pendant la périodes du black friday et Cyber monday

Que peuvent faire les marques?

Il faut noter que de nombreuses marques sont vendues et seront toujours vendus sur AMAZON. De nombreux avantages existent en effet pour les marques qui souhaitent pénétrer le marché américain sans y ouvrir de magasins physiques. Il y’a un temps où les marques considéraient AMAZON comme un concurrent, la réalité est que AMAZON est désormais un partenaire, un peu comme Facebook Ads ou Google Adwords. Ces sites ne sont pas des concurrents mais des plateformes permettant de rejoindre un nombre très important de prospects et clients. Ainsi grâce à leur réputation qui ne cesse de croître et la confiance que les clients leur accordent, une logistique et des process de facturation et de livraison de qualité, les équipes Amazon disposent de tous les atouts pour développer le potentiel des petits marchands.

Comment collaborer avec les influenceurs

Les influenceurs se sont toutes les personnes qui aggrègent autour de leur personnalité et de leur profil une audience. Il peut s’agir :

De journalistes
D’écrivains
De bloggeurs, bloggeuses, Instagrameurs
De you Tubers
De conseillers politiques
Consultants de renom
Etc

En réalité chaque niche ou segment de marché a ses propres règles et j’ai souvent coutume de dire qu’il faut faire une analyse de la niche afin d’identifier les influenceurs.

Les influenceurs un poste de dépenses parmis tant d’autres

Au fil des années, on a vu les budgets d’acquisition changé. Par le passé il était assez simple pour les responsables marketing d’organiser leur budget autour des médias traditionnels

TV
Radio
Affichage
Presse écrite
etc

A cette époque (où le numérique n’était pas aussi prépondérent) les plans médias s’articulaient autour des éléments ci-dessus mentionnés. Grâce ou à cause d’internet, l’équation est devenu encore plus complexe. L’arrivée des régies en ligne et notamment les plus puissantes d’entre-elles Google Adwords ou Facebook ont éduqué pendant ces dernières années les marketers. On est donc passé d’une répartition du budget entre les médias traditionnels à avoir en plus à gérer

Les liens sponsorisés
Le retargeting
Google Adsense
Double click
Facebook Ads
etc

Mais ce n’est pas tout car à côté des plateformes d’Emailing, les plateformes d’affiliation, les comprateurs de prix, les places de marché comme Amazon le marketing d’influences continuent de poser de sérieuses difficultés aux marketers qui cherchent à maximiser leurs investissements. Il n’est donc plus surprenant de lire des études sur un changement de culture. Les responsables marketing souhaitent désormais se concentrer sur les résultats de tests pour se faire leur propre opinion.

Comment identifier les influenceurs aujourd’hui

1- Utilisez Twitter

L’outil followerwonk de Moz est celui que je privilégie pour cette recherche d’influenceurs. En effet cet outil foncitonne comme un moteur de recherche vous permettant d’identifier les internautes de la communautés Twitter qui sont des journalistes, écrivains, etc. L’outil propose différents indicateurs de mesure de l’influence des abonnés Twitter permettant ainsi de les classer selon leur capacité à propager votre message par exemple ou leur nombre d’abonnés.

2- Utilisez Linkedin

Linkedin est très souvent négligé et pourtant peu de bloggeurs, journalistes et influenceurs se font approcher par ce canal. Grâce à un compte Premium vous avez différentes options de filtres pour affiner votre recherche.

3- Utilisez Google

Gratuit et simple. Allez sur google et recherchez des articles qui couvrent ou qui rassemblent les récents classements d’influenceurs est une très bonne astuce. Par exemple :

Classement des blogs français
Meilleurs blogs de mode homme ou femme
Tops blogs en France
etc

4- Utilisez Instagram ou Pinterest

Si vous travaillez dans la mode, la bijouterie, le luxe ou encore la décoration il y’a de fortes chance que votre audience soit sur ces deux plateformes. Par conséquent, il faut y passer du temps afin d’identifier les comptes qui rassemblent le plus d’abonnés

Comment collaborer avec les bloggeurs et autres influenceurs

L’approche traditionnelle

Une fois que vous avez les coordonnés de l’influenceur en question, un simple Email suffit pour prendre contact. Parfois il peut être utile de contacter poliment la personne sur Twitter ou Linkedin avant un email ou un appel. Notez qu’il s’agit ici de contruire des relations sur le long terme. Les bloggeurs et influenceurs sont des professionnels aue vous pourrez solliciter plusieurs fois tout au long de votre carrière, il faut donc collaborer et viser l’établissement de relations durables et pas l’inverse.

Passer par une régie

Certaines régies aggrègent des communautés de bloggeurs, journalistes et contributeurs. Une façon rapide de lancer votre campagne peut simplement être de passer par une régie.

Franck NLEMBA

Consultant commerce electronique