Why an evolving commerce funnel demands unified measurement

“The traditional idea of a static media funnel has significantly evolved,” said Moody Khan, vp, RMN measurement strategy at Circana. “There was a heavy focus on engaging shoppers and driving them down the funnel. It’s not that this doesn’t exist anymore, but there are moments where the funnel collapses. For brands, this means thinking about their media strategy differently: understanding where their shoppers are engaging today and where they’re converting, and evolving with them.”

How social commerce is disrupting traditional commerce media

Platforms like TikTok are expanding the surface area of commerce by serving as powerful discovery engines driven by influencers and content creators.

While retailers often view social commerce as a discovery driver, it is becoming more of a full-funnel experience, according to Circana’s evp of thought leadership, Kiara Barrett. For instance, according to Circana data, TikTok Shop generated $11 billion in Q1 2026, accounting for 1% of total retail sales and 3% of e-commerce sales.

“TikTok has created this frictionless, story-led, inspiration-led environment that creates a very easy way for consumers to come in to learn and purchase,” said Barrett. “What that means for retailers is that they’re losing a little bit of that exclusivity on commerce data, versus having owned it previously.”

However, as social commerce drives broader demand, retail media networks have an opportunity to capture and convert consumers on their own platforms.

“The rise of social commerce is not necessarily replacing RMNs, but it is reshaping how that demand is created,” Barrett said. “People are being introduced to new brands that they otherwise wouldn’t have considered before. But the big question that marketers are dealing with is, ‘How do you attribute it?’”

The rise of agentic commerce and signal loss

Agentic commerce — when consumer decision-making and execution are delegated to AI agents that dynamically optimize across retailers, products and prices — is also having a significant impact on the changing funnel.

“We recently did a survey of our consumer panel where we talked about their AI use and what people told us is that they’re engaging with AI agents in commerce for a multitude of reasons,” Barrett said. “Seventy percent said they’re using it for search as they’re looking to discover things, and 48% said they use it for getting recommendations. And for some of their task offload, almost 50% of people. So they’re absolutely integrating agents into their life and into their commerce ecosystem.”

With these shifts taking hold, savvy brands and retailers will need to be proactive and adapt to changing behavior patterns.

“Brands and retailers are going to have to re-optimize toward what agents care about, and how those consumers are reacting to those agents and what shows up at the front door,” said Lindsay Pullins, svp, global retail media and commerce at Circana.

As more consumers embrace agentic AI for e-commerce, it threatens traditional measurement as well.

“The biggest concern right now, specifically with agentic commerce, and it also applies to social commerce, is signal loss. When we think about the existing closed-loop measurement framework that’s made retail media so robust, it’s being able to connect the exposure to the sale that happens either in-store or online,” Khan said. “Decision-making is now happening so much closer to the moment of purchase. Signals are being interpreted continuously, and then the execution needs to adjust in real-time.

“When we start thinking about agentic commerce, these agentic transactions might not carry any of the traditional ad tech signals. So if an agent is completing a checkout, there might not be a viewable impression, a click or a cookie,” he explained. “So we have to reimagine the entire architecture of how retail media measurement was built. Depending on what the decision criteria continues to be for agents, measurement’s going to evolve around how we are influencing that decision process with media.”

Unified measurement and purchase data are helping marketers navigate fragmentation

Social and agentic commerce have changed how consumers discover and buy, but marketing attribution and closed-loop measurement have become more challenging as retailers lose exclusivity over consumer data and as other insights are scattered across channels and walled gardens.

The compression of the commerce funnel is also pushing advertisers to take a closer look at their measurement stacks. By shifting from basic attribution models to ones that prioritize incrementality and cross-retailer lift — as well as leaning on third-party measurement partners — advertisers can gain a more accurate, unified view of their efforts and how they drive results.

As measurement shifts from media-oriented KPIs to concrete business outcomes, purchase data is emerging as essential. It’s also a foundational element of unified measurement frameworks. For instance, if a shopper buys a product at a given retailer, that retailer’s first-party data may classify them as new-to-brand, although total-market purchase data shows that they bought the brand or product elsewhere. However, rest-of-market measurement looks at total market purchase data to determine if that shopper is truly a new-to-brand buyer nationally or if they have previously purchased from the brand elsewhere.

“Purchase data becomes a critical point for AI in any facet, whether it’s agentic, whether you’re just using it for optimizations or using it for measurement results across the ecosystem,” Pullins said. “Purchase data becomes king in that. The impressions that we optimize to today will look very different in an agentic world driven by purchase data, because that is a source of truth.”

Partner insights from Circana