Native Advertising in Retail Media: Networks, Pricing Models and Benchmarks (2026)

Last updated: October 2026. Reviewed by Kunal Damgude, Growth and Product Marketing Manager.

In retail media, native advertising is already built into the most common unit: sponsored product ads render as part of the shopping page, so a retailer needs no separate native ad unit. A retailer earns more from native demand by choosing which networks it works with, pricing on the right model, benchmarking against sourced click-through and cost ranges, and building custom formats that brands can only buy on its own site.

Osmos is a white-label retail media operating system for retailers and marketplaces. Its modular apps for onsite, offsite and in-store ads sit over your existing stack, so you can break your monetisation ceiling faster without rebuilding it.

The full return-on-ad-spend matrix by platform, format and vertical lives in Osmos's hub on ROAS benchmarks by platform and ad format.

Is native advertising a separate ad format in retail media?

Native advertising is a paid placement styled to match the design, tone and behaviour of the page carrying it, and inside a retail media network the most common unit already meets that definition without any extra work, so native is a property of that unit and needs no format of its own. A sponsored product ad is assembled by the platform from the catalog listing the retailer already publishes (the image, the title, the price and the star rating), so the advertiser never uploads a creative and never opts into a "native version" of the unit. Nielsen reaches the same conclusion from the buy side, describing sponsored products as "the most native of all ad formats on RMNs" in its analysis of how brands split retail media budgets.

Sponsored brand units, onsite display and onsite video all run on an asset the advertiser uploads, and creative control, and with it format design, sits in those formats. On Osmos, the auto-assembled unit is Product Ads. Product Display Ads are rebuilt from the retailer's catalog on every impression, personalized to the shopper, with several clickable listings per ad. The standard format taxonomy, and where each unit runs, is set out in Osmos's guide to sponsored ad formats in retail media.

On the open web a native ad is styled like the surrounding article, and native display is planned and budgeted as its own category. eMarketer put US native display ad spending at $147.98 billion in 2026, up 13.1% year over year, in its January 2026 native advertising FAQ.

A native static is a single-image native ad: a photo with a headline and short copy placed in a publisher's feed. Statics are the volume format of open-web native networks and the format most ad-intelligence tools catalogue. On a retailer's own category page or homepage, a static in-feed unit is a display placement, and the retailer prices and measures it as one.

A retail media team's rate card therefore carries no separate "native" line. The revenue in native depends on which outside networks the retailer works with, which pricing model each unit carries, and which units it builds so that brands can buy them only on its site.

Which native advertising networks matter to a retailer in 2026?

Retailers work with native networks to bring brand demand into their inventory, to extend their audience offsite, or to benchmark the brand budget their own formats compete for. Osmos groups the networks a retailer meets into those roles, because one vendor can partner with a retailer on one deal and compete with it for brand budget on another. Criteo works mostly in the first role, TripleLift in the second, and Taboola, Teads and Life360 Ads featuring Nativo in the third, as open-web and app networks whose native budgets a retailer's custom formats are weighed against.

Criteo's retailer count is taken from PPC Land's coverage of Criteo's Q2 2026 results.

Which partner works at scale or for return on investment? Teads and Taboola offer scale on publisher supply, while a retailer's own inventory wins on closed-loop proof, because it can tie an ad to an order on its own site. When a retailer chooses a programmatic partner for retail media and display, it should check that the partner brings new brand budget, leaves pricing and floors with the retailer, and reports against orders the retailer can verify.

Where offsite fits. When a retailer wants its first-party audiences to travel to publisher and social inventory, it runs them through offsite retail media on Osmos, from the retailer's own seat and with first-party audiences the retailer controls. The native networks above then become places the audience runs, and the retailer keeps the reporting.

Criteo vs Taboola: does commerce data or contextual data perform better?

Each vendor publishes its own comparison, and the better choice depends on the retailer's inventory and the brand's goal.

Criteo describes its edge as "the world's largest open commerce dataset", covering consumer data for 20 countries and 600+ product categories, and frames commerce media as using "large-scale purchase and intent data and commerce-focused AI". The signal is what shoppers bought and browsed, which makes it strongest near the point of sale: on retailer sites and in retargeting toward a product.

Taboola describes Realize as performance advertising technology "powered by 17 years of unique publisher data". The signal is what people read and click on publisher pages, which makes it strongest for reaching people before they are shopping for a specific product, in the reading moments that come earlier in the purchase path.

When a retailer prices its own onsite inventory, it is offering commerce data in its purest form, the purchase signal on its own site. Its comparison set is commerce-data buyers, and it defends its rate card with closed-loop results. When it buys reach offsite to bring shoppers back, a holdout test on its own conversions should settle the choice between contextual and commerce signals.

Amazon Ads vs Criteo vs Instacart Ads.

What native advertising pricing models exist, and which should a retailer set its rate card on?

Native advertising is priced on cost per click, cost per thousand impressions, viewable cost per thousand, cost per acquisition, or a flat or reserved fee, and a retailer should set each unit's rate card on the model that matches what the unit delivers. On the open web, MGID's 2026 pricing guide notes that native "is typically priced using one of two models: cost per click (CPC) or cost per mille (CPM)". The other models show up mainly in direct deals and retail media.

Sequence Commerce gives a $1.18 to $1.22 platform average cost per click, and its FAQ says "Average CPC runs $0.75 to $1.20 for most categories." Both ranges are an agency's directional aggregate, and the $0.53 Instacart figure is RMIQ's own average across the campaigns it manages.

Screens and physical placements in stores are priced per store, per campaign or per day, tied to store count and duration, because few stores have the sensors that would make an impression count credible.

How to set the floor on a unit with no comparable. A retailer's floor comes from its own numbers: the conversion rate its existing placements deliver, its average order value, and the return a brand needs to keep buying. On illustrative numbers, if a retailer's product placements convert at 10% and its average order value is $45, a click is worth $4.50 in order value to the brand; at a 4x return target, the brand can pay up to roughly $1.12 per click before the buy stops working. That lands inside the $0.75 to $1.22 Amazon band above. The floor moves with the retailer's own conversion rate and basket, and where it sits below the reference band, the retailer closes the gap with performance evidence. Osmos's guide on how to monetize onsite traffic covers turning that floor into onsite revenue.

Comparing monetization rates across networks. A published CPC or CPM is the price per unit. A retailer's revenue is the rate times the share of inventory that fills times the share of booked budget that actually spends, so a lower list price with higher fill and utilization can out-earn a higher one. Osmos sets out the revenue-share and pricing structures behind onsite and offsite rate cards in its guide to ROAS and monetization on a media retail network.

What are the CTR and CPM benchmarks for native and display advertising in 2026?

Open-web native ads click through at about 0.30% to 0.60%, and in MGID's words, "EMARKETER considers a CTR above 0.4% a sign of strong native advertising performance in 2026." Retail media formats on Amazon range from 0.08% for display to 0.70% for the best sponsored product placements, per the dated sources below.

The click-through ranges in circulation come from vendors and agencies, and they differ by an order of magnitude because definitions, samples and vintages differ. Osmos found no IAB display or native CTR benchmark. IAB publishes definitions, measurement standards and revenue reports, so any "IAB display CTR" figure quoted in a deck needs its real source checked.

Inside one retail platform, click-through falls by roughly a factor of five from search-adjacent placements to display. A high-impact custom unit therefore needs its own measured baseline, and a display or search benchmark will misprice it.

Open-web native CTRs describe a reader on a publisher page, not a shopper on a retailer's product listing page.

Retail media CPM benchmarks for 2025 and 2026. The sourced CPM points are the open-web native range of $5 to $15 from MGID and Instacart's $15 first-price floor for display and video from RMIQ's September 2026 guide. Neither IAB nor Amazon publishes a 2025 retail media CPM benchmark report. Broader retail media effectiveness benchmarks, from return on ad spend to conversion rate, are collected in Osmos's retail media benchmarks for 2026.

How big is the retail media demand pool in 2026, and where does it concentrate?

US advertisers spent $60.32 billion on retail media in 2025 and will spend $71.09 billion in 2026, a rise of 17.8%, according to eMarketer's January 2026 forecast. For a retailer setting rates, the concentration shows how much budget is in play outside the networks that set buyer expectations.

Amazon keeps raising that reference: it reported $19.8 billion in advertising services revenue for Q2 2026, up 26% year over year.

Per Nielsen's mid-2025 breakdown, brands split their Amazon retail media budgets 40% to sponsored products, 24% to sponsored brands, 20% to display and 16% to video. A high-impact custom unit competes for the display and video share, roughly a third of the budget, so the pool a custom format competes for is smaller than the headline total.

Which retailers have built their own ad formats in 2026?

Criteo, Costco and Home Depot all launched retailer-built or retailer-exclusive ad units in the past 18 months, and the fastest adoption number belongs to Criteo's auction-based display. A custom ad format is an ad unit the retailer designs and builds on its own surfaces. Brands can buy that inventory only from the retailer, so the retailer can price it on its own terms.

Criteo introduced auction-based display in June 2025, and the unit went from 60 retailers in the first quarter of 2026 to more than 85 in the second, per PPC Land's report on Criteo's Q2 2026 results. The same report covers the wider picture: Criteo cut its full-year guidance as quarterly revenue fell 11% to $428 million, while media spend in its Retail Media business reached $527 million, up 31% at constant currency, with more than 4,500 brands active. A retailer deciding whether differentiated inventory attracts brand budget should read the adoption figure.

Costco Velocity opened beta access to Reserved Display, a homepage and search placement, in Q2 2026 (eMarketer, 20 March 2026). Home Depot's Orange Apron Media introduced Category Leaderboards on category landing pages at its April 2026 InFronts (Home Depot newsroom). Osmos places both builds in the wider format story in its guide to sponsored ad formats in retail media.

The leading display formats retailers run today are catalog-driven display, standard banners, shoppable video, and custom high-impact units such as homepage widgets, takeovers and category leaderboards. Osmos's piece on how display ads in retail media have evolved traces how the banner became that wider set.

What a custom format did for one pharmacy. Osmos worked with one of India's largest online pharmacies, an app with more than 5 million downloads, to grow its display program with high-impact placements. Osmos recommended new homepage widgets ("Skincare Picks", "Cold and Cough Products" and "In the Spotlight") that opened more inventory, and the pharmacy raised keyword-level floor cost-per-click prices so advertisers bid more competitively for premium keywords. With Osmos, the pharmacy generated $484K in ad revenue in July 2025, saw a 20% ad revenue uplift from the homepage after the widget launch, and recorded a 26% increase in budget utilization. The full account is in the Osmos pharmacy success story.

How to price a custom unit without an industry multiple. A retailer can anchor the price on the floor from its own conversion rate and basket (set out in the pricing section), on a published adjacent floor such as Instacart's $15 CPM for shoppable display, and on adoption evidence such as Criteo's auction-based display growth, which shows brands funding differentiated retailer inventory. No independent benchmark for what a retailer-built format earns over standard display has been published, and the premium multiples in circulation trace back to vendor copy. Open the first term at an introductory rate, measure the unit, and re-price at renewal on the retailer's own results.

Which platforms offer transparent measurement and ROI, and what should a retailer be able to show?

IAB Europe's Commerce Media Measurement Standards V2.1 is the current benchmark for transparent retail media reporting. IAB Europe published V2.1 on 22 January 2026; it sets "a 30-day lookback window is the default" for reporting, while still asking retailers to offer customisable options. V2.1 also adds a formal incrementality definition with approved methods, standardised gross and net sales definitions, five new-to-brand and new-to-category timeframes, quick commerce metrics, and a section on measurement and insights delivery tools. The six-month grace period for moving from earlier versions ran to the end of July 2026.

IAB Europe's Retail Media Certification Programme lets retailers and ad tech partners "demonstrate audited compliance" with the standards, so a brand can check a network's reporting against an audit. If a custom format reports on a window longer than 30 days, a retailer should say so up front.

What a brand needs to see before it renews. A brand renewing at a premium rate asks for reporting on delivery, outcomes and incrementality.

1. Delivery and attention. Impressions, viewability and, for video, completion, reported against the IAB Europe definitions so the numbers line up with the brand's other buys.
2. Outcomes. Attributed sales, return on ad spend and new-to-brand share, where new-to-brand means shoppers new to the advertiser's brand, who may already shop the retailer every week.
3. Incrementality. A holdout result that shows the unit created demand the brand would otherwise not have had. Brands use holdout results to show that a custom format with no outside comparable drove incremental sales.

Osmos builds that reporting into the retailer's stack. Osmos Measurement runs holdouts with synthetic control so a retailer can share lift results with every brand; Incrementality is currently in Early Access for onsite sponsored display. Osmos custom formats report from impression to attributed order and ROAS in one view with the rest of Onsite. Osmos explains the methods behind holdouts in its guide to incrementality testing in retail media, and attribution windows and models in its retail media attribution and measurement guide.

Native ad intelligence platforms and ad-spy tools. Native ad intelligence platforms, often called ad-spy tools, monitor the creatives and landing pages that advertisers run across open-web native networks such as Taboola, and tools like AdPlexity and Anstrex are built for affiliate and performance marketers studying competitors. They answer a buyer's question: what are other advertisers running? A retailer's equivalent is its own first-party reporting: which brands are spending, on which units, at what fill and with what measured lift, which is the evidence that decides renewals.

Where does Osmos fit for retailers building native and custom formats?

Osmos is the retail ad software layer a retailer uses to run native-looking formats on its own inventory, price them, and report them to brands, without rebuilding its stack. Osmos Onsite runs every onsite format from one ad server, and its custom ad formats render with the retailer's fonts, spacing, colour and component patterns so they read as part of the page.

A retailer can build a format itself in the Osmos visual builder, controlling layout, fields and behaviour, or brief the spec and have Osmos design and ship it on the same infrastructure. Either way the unit runs on the same auction and reporting as Product Ads and Product Display Ads, so a brand buys and measures it like any other placement. Offsite, Osmos extends the same first-party audiences to the open web from the retailer's own seat, and Osmos Measurement carries the proof back to the brand.

To see how a custom format would run on your site, book an Osmos demo.

Frequently Asked Questions

Which native platform offers the lowest CPC?

Of the dated figures available, open-web native carries the lowest cost per click, $0.20 to $0.50 (MGID, August 2026), against about $0.75 to $1.22 on Amazon (Sequence Commerce, July 2026) and a $0.53 average across RMIQ-managed Instacart campaigns (RMIQ, September 2026). A retailer comparing native partners should rank them on cost per attributed order, or ideally on cost per incremental order from a holdout.

Is there an IAB display CTR benchmark?

IAB does not publish a display CTR benchmark. IAB's role is definitions and measurement standards, and IAB Europe's certification programme is the closest thing to an independent check on a retail media network's numbers.

Which metrics matter most for evaluating retail media network success?

From the retailer's side, the network-health metrics are ad revenue as a share of gross merchandise value, fill rate on each unit, the number of active advertisers and how many come back each quarter, and budget utilization, the share of booked budget that actually spends. Brand-facing results (return on ad spend, new-to-brand share, incremental lift) belong on the brand's scorecard.

What counts as a custom ad format, and how is it different from a standard unit?

The working test is whether a brand could buy the same placement on another network. A placement built into the retailer's own page design or data, which no other network offers, can carry its own rate. A placement a brand can buy elsewhere prices like standard inventory.

Do custom ad formats work in-store as well as onsite?

Yes, with different commercial logic. In-store inventory is priced and targeted by place and time (which store, which day, which hour), so neither the CPM model nor shopper-level targeting carries over from onsite. The build-out is covered in Osmos's guide to in-store retail media monetization, and the channel itself on Osmos In-store.

Sources

1. MGID, How Much Does Native Advertising Cost (3 March 2026, updated August 2026)
2. eMarketer, FAQ on native advertising: formats, AI opportunities, and the best metrics for 2026 (15 January 2026)
3. Sequence Commerce, Amazon Ads CPC and Conversion Rate Benchmarks 2026 (last updated 17 July 2026)
4. RMIQ, Instacart Ads Advertising Guide 2026 (facts checked September 2026)
5. IAB Europe, Commerce (incl. Retail) Media Measurement Standards V2.1 (22 January 2026)
6. PPC Land, Criteo cuts full-year guidance as Q2 revenue falls 11% to $428 million (5 August 2026)
7. eMarketer, FAQ on retail media networks: how marketers should allocate budgets in 2026 (9 January 2026)
8. Amazon.com, Amazon.com Announces Second Quarter Results (30 July 2026)
9. Nielsen, The Future of Retail Media (June 2025)
10. eMarketer, Costco Velocity Reserved Display launch coverage (20 March 2026)
11. The Home Depot, Orange Apron Media Unveils New Partnerships, Onsite Offerings, and Certification Program at Third Annual InFronts (22 April 2026)
12. Criteo, Commerce Media Platform page, criteo.com/commerce-media-platform (checked 12 October 2026)
13. Taboola, homepage, taboola.com (checked 12 October 2026)
14. Teads, homepage, teads.com (checked 12 October 2026)
15. TripleLift, homepage, triplelift.com (checked 12 October 2026)
16. Life360, Life360 Completes Acquisition of Nativo and Surpasses 50 Million U.S. MAU, ads.life360.com (5 January 2026; checked 12 October 2026)
17. Osmos, Unlocking homepage monetization: India's leading online pharmacy