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Mobile is where today’s customers browse, shop, and buy. 60% of all e-commerce transactions now happen on mobile devices, and that number is only climbing. Apps, in particular, are where high-intent users convert, where brands are seeing 2–3x higher conversion rates compared to mobile web.
But here’s the problem: most retail media platforms and affiliate networks can’t see what happens in apps. Due to consumer opt-out rates, platform limitations, signal loss, and poor deep linking, marketers are often left with incomplete or entirely missing conversion data from their most valuable environments.
That means:
When marketers can’t see what’s working, they can’t invest with confidence. Retailers and advertisers alike face real consequences:
At a time when performance marketers are already facing diminishing returns from social ads (with 75% reporting underperformance), retail media needs to step up as a more efficient, intent-driven alternative. But it can’t do that if mobile attribution is still fuzzy.
Retail media is built to be a performance channel. It promises closed-loop measurement, commerce-driven intent, and seamless shopper journeys. But when a user clicks a retail media ad and ends up on a dead link or gets dropped into the wrong experience (like a mobile web fallback instead of an app checkout), it’s not just a bad user experience… It’s lost revenue.
Retail media relies on measurable outcomes to compete with more mature channels like paid search and social. Yet its mobile measurement infrastructure often relies on outdated or probabilistic methods, and many campaigns can't properly attribute post-click conversions when they occur in apps, especially if the user isn’t previously cookied or logged in.
And with apps accounting for the lion’s share of mobile revenue, that’s a massive blind spot.
For retail media to compete as a serious performance channel, one that can shift budgets away from declining social and display campaigns, it needs to prove it in every environment, on every device, every time. That starts by fixing mobile attribution.
The retailers, publishers, and brands who solve attribution first will be the ones who win the next wave of spend. Because in performance marketing, what you can’t measure, you can’t grow. And right now, there’s still a lot being left on the table.
Marketers need deterministic signals that show exactly which clicks led to which purchases, across mobile web and app, without relying on probabilistic models or broken experiences.
That means:
This is where Button plays a big role. With AI-powered routing, deterministic attribution, and mobile-first technology, we help partners recapture the moments they’re currently missing — unlocking 3x higher conversion rates and full-funnel visibility. It’s the kind of infrastructure retail media needs if it’s going to keep pace with rising expectations from advertisers.
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