By Marc Fanelli, SVP, Global Digital Audiences and Operations, at Eyeota, Dun & Bradstreet

On January 6, PayPal announced a new set of ad insights and measurement capabilities built on its transaction graph, positioning it as a way to move beyond proxy metrics and toward measurement grounded in real-world purchase behavior across merchants and platforms.

That announcement matters less for what it adds to one company’s roadmap and more for what it signals about where commerce and retail media are headed next. Transaction-level data is quickly becoming the standard that advertisers will use to judge both performance and credibility. In a world of tightening budgets and heightened scrutiny, “trust me” measurement is getting replaced by “show me” measurement.

For retailers building or scaling retail media and broader commerce marketing programs, this shift reshapes how audiences should be built and forces a more disciplined approach to transparency and cross-channel accountability.

Transaction graphs complement identity and audience data. They do not replace them.

There is a temptation to treat transaction-level data as the holy grail, especially when the industry is tired of probabilistic identifiers and walled-garden reporting. But retailers should avoid swinging from one form of overconfidence to another.

Transaction data is an incredibly strong outcome signal, but it is not a complete marketing signal. It does not automatically answer:

• Who else was exposed in other channels?
• What drove consideration before conversion?
• How should purchases should be attributed across multiple touchpoints?
• Do the observed transactions represent the full market, or only the portion visible through a particular graph?

This is where identity resolution, audience insights, and privacy-first data governance still matter. Retailers need a way to connect exposure and outcomes across environments while being transparent about what is deterministic, what is modeled, and what is simply unknown. In a fragmented ecosystem, trust depends on data provenance and transparency, not just the size of the dataset.

As retailers adapt, many will find that transaction signals are strongest when they’re paired with high-quality third-party audience and identity inputs that extend beyond a single platform or merchant footprint. The retailers that win will be those that work with trusted data partners who can enrich first-party understanding with consistent, privacy-first data sets, clear provenance, and global scale, helping advertisers plan and activate across channels without sacrificing transparency.

What retailers should do now to meet the new expectations

Retailers do not need to “win” the transaction graph arms race to benefit from this shift. But they do need to modernize their approaches. Four strategies stand out.

1. Standardize incrementality and attribution definitions internally before advertisers demand it.If different teams use different rules for new-to-file, incrementality windows, the organization will struggle to defend results externally. Align on definitions, document them, and keep a versioned measurement playbook that can be shared with partners and advertisers.
2. Build measurement that can survive comparison, not just optimization.Retailers have historically optimized within their own ecosystems. The next phase is benchmarking across ecosystems. Independent measurement approaches are increasingly positioned as a way to create comparability and credibility across retail media networks.
3. Treat data governance as a growth lever, not compliance overhead.More transaction linkage means more scrutiny around consent, data usage boundaries, and data minimization. Strong governance becomes a sales enablement function: The retailer that can clearly explain sourcing, matching logic, and privacy controls will win trust faster than the retailer that simply claims superior data.
4. Balance transaction truth with contextual understanding.Transaction data tells you what happened. Retailers still need supporting signals to understand why it happened and how to influence what happens next. That means pairing transaction-level outcomes with broader audience signals, creative and placement insights, and channel-level context so brands can make repeatable decisions rather than chasing last month’s correlations.

The caution: Transaction data can create false confidence, too.

Finally, retailers should be candid about what can go wrong when transaction-level measurement becomes the centerpiece.

• Selection bias: A transaction graph may be large, but still not fully representative of the market.
• Over-attribution: Tying exposure to purchase can lead teams to over-credit the last measurable touchpoint.
• Short-term optimization: Transaction KPIs can encourage chasing quick conversions at the expense of long-term brand demand.

The remedy is not to retreat from transaction truth. It is to build programs designed for durability: transparent methodology, independent validation where appropriate, and a deliberate blend of deterministic outcomes with the context needed to interpret them responsibly.

As evidenced by PayPal’s announcement, commerce advertising is moving into an era where transaction-level accountability becomes table stakes, and where the most valued measurement is the kind that can travel across platforms, withstand scrutiny, and map marketing to real commercial outcomes. Retailers that respond by tightening their measurement standards, strengthening transparency, and designing audiences that can be proven, not just promised, will be the ones that earn the next wave of budgets.

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