Building a CPG brand changes the way you think about commerce very quickly. From the outside, the flaws of ecommerce are still framed as media and attribution problems. Inside the business, it becomes clear that growth is shaped just as much by freight costs, retailer terms, inventory exposure and margin pressure as it is by campaign performance.
The industry still talks about optimization in channel-specific terms: ROAS, CAC, conversion rate, marketplace performance and cross-channel attribution, among others. Those metrics matter, but they rarely reflect the operational realities that determine whether a brand is actually healthy.
Founders don’t make decisions based solely on dashboards, but on cash flow, contribution margin, inventory risk and survivability. That distinction becomes especially important in CPG, where the economics of growth have fundamentally shifted. A decade ago, the prevailing belief was that digital-first brands could scale efficiently through DTC and paid social alone. Today, acquisition costs are significantly higher, marketplaces are more saturated and operational costs continue to compress margins across the board. As a result, many emerging brands are rethinking channel strategy entirely.
The Return of Retail
Brick-and-mortar retail is regaining importance, not because founders are abandoning ecommerce, but because physical distribution often creates more stable economics. Wholesale relationships can improve discoverability, lower blended acquisition costs and create more predictable purchasing behavior than constantly competing for attention in overcrowded digital environments. The problem is that measurement systems have not evolved alongside those decisions.
Retail media may appear highly efficient in isolation, but that picture can change once trade spend, retailer fees, slotting costs, co-op spend and wholesale dynamics are factored in. A campaign that appears to be a top performer on a media dashboard can still erode contribution margin once the full economics are applied. Marketplace growth can create the same problem, masking deteriorating margins behind strong sales volume. Paid campaigns may look successful on paper while creating inventory exposure that strains the business operationally.
At the same time, offline and online behavior remain artificially separated in many measurement environments, even though consumer decision-making is continuous and fluid. A shopper may discover a product through social media, research it on Amazon, purchase it at retail and reorder through DTC. Most platforms still struggle to connect those interactions into a unified understanding of business impact.
For emerging brands, that fragmentation creates a real risk. A single incomplete attribution can lead to over-ordering inventory, overspending on paid acquisition, or prioritizing the wrong channel at the wrong stage of growth. These aren’t just rounding errors. They could be the difference between a brand that scales and one that misses the mark.
Measuring What Matters
The future of commerce measurement cannot be limited to media performance alone. The next generation of measurement platforms will need to understand commerce the way operators do: as a system where marketing, distribution, fulfillment, retail partnerships and customer behavior all influence one another.
The companies that solve this well will not only help brands optimize campaigns more efficiently but also help them make smarter business decisions in environments where margins are tighter, channels are more fragmented and sustainable growth is harder to achieve.
Every founder I know who’s scaled a CPG brand past the hard part learned the same lesson: the dashboard that felt like a compass was actually a rearview mirror. Until measurement catches up to how commerce actually works, that’s still true.
Elissa Brown is the North America Ecommerce Industry Lead at AppsFlyer, where she helps leading brands connect mobile behavior to real business outcomes across the shopper journey. She brings 20 years of digital marketing experience across agencies, brands and platforms, including 15 years at holding companies such as Omnicom, Havas and Dentsu. Her background also includes hands-on ecommerce brand launches and senior platform roles at Pinterest and Quantcast, where she managed enterprise partnerships tied to billions in media spend. Today, Elissa advises AppsFlyer’s top ecommerce brands on measurement and attribution challenges.
