Marketplaces Need Trusted Attribution
Andrew Yates, CEO of Promoted.ai, on when marketplaces should layer on ads
The hard part of marketplace ads is not selling clicks, it is proving incremental sales in a way sellers trust. On Google and Meta, large brands already run dedicated measurement workstreams because platform dashboards alone are not enough for budget decisions. A younger marketplace has even less data, fewer conversion signals, and more idiosyncratic buyer journeys, so adoption depends on building credible attribution before pushing ad spend.
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In this interview, the core product is really measurement and ranking, not ads by themselves. The immediate win comes from A/B testing whether better search and discovery lifts purchases. Ads come later, after the marketplace can explain where each extra dollar of seller spend creates value.
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The closest marketplace comparables show why operators keep chasing ads anyway. Mirakl says its ads business grew more than 100% in 2024, and its retailer clients are following Amazon and Walmart into a much higher margin revenue stream than core retail operations.
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The infrastructure burden is real even for scaled ad businesses. Rokt only works because it is deeply integrated into checkout flows across thousands of merchants, and Instacart now sells a unified retail media stack partly around the promise of transparent reporting that advertisers can validate.
This points toward a market where retail media winners look less like simple ad slot sellers and more like measurement systems with ad inventory attached. The marketplaces that compound ad revenue will be the ones that can show clean experiments, trusted reporting, and seller economics that hold up after the campaign ends.