Commerce media is capturing a growing share of advertiser budgets by targeting consumers at a moment traditional channels miss: when they're actively making a purchase. This year, commerce media is expected to reach nearly 21% of digital ad spending and nearly 17.5% of total media spend, according to EMARKETER's April forecast.

"There's never a clearer sign that someone is open to a new offer in buying something than when they're literally buying something," said Sophie Donoghue, senior vice president of client success at Rokt, at EMARKETER's Ad Buyer Strategies Summit in conversation with our analyst Suzy Davidkhanian. "It's a really active environment versus a passive scrolling."

Sophie Donoghue speaking at EMARKETER's Ad Buyer Strategies Summit

The transaction moment represents a fundamental shift in how performance marketers think about customer acquisition, creating what Donoghue calls "the fourth bucket" of performance marketing alongside search, social, and affiliate channels.

What defines the transaction moment

The transaction moment extends beyond traditional retail checkout pages to encompass any point where consumers are actively making a purchase decision.

This includes environments where consumers are:

• Completing purchases on ecommerce sites
• Buying movie tickets or event passes
• Booking rideshare services like Uber, Lyft, or Curb
• Purchasing airline tickets
• Sending money through payment apps like Venmo
• Ordering food delivery

"The transaction moment is really more a sequential buying mindset," said Donoghue. She said Rokt has unlocked a network of 10 billion transactions annually across these diverse verticals, creating unprecedented scale for advertisers seeking high-intent audiences.

The breadth of transaction moments allows advertisers to reach consumers across multiple touchpoints in a single day, finding them wherever they naturally transact rather than interrupting their browsing experience.

Why commerce media delivers incremental customers

Performance marketers are discovering that commerce media reaches audiences they couldn't find through traditional targeting methods, including lookalike modeling.

"The conversation quickly pivots from 'Does it work?' to 'Can we scale?'" Donoghue said. "Pretty much every brand that comes to us will either have a CPA or a ROAS or an LTV KPI that they're working towards, and they're like, 'can you hit this goal efficiently?' The first thing we always want to prove out is yes, we can. And then what we are hearing from a lot of our brands is, 'this channel is really incremental.'"

The channel functions as top-of-funnel awareness with bottom-of-funnel performance outcomes. Customers weren't necessarily looking for an introduction to a brand, but the high-intent environment makes them receptive to relevant offers.

Brands are finding net new customers they couldn't reach through existing channels, driving growth beyond their current acquisition strategies while maintaining performance marketing efficiency standards.

Relevance vs. personalization

Commerce media platforms are using first-party data to ensure offers feel helpful rather than disruptive, but there's a critical distinction between relevance and personalization.

Personalization focuses on how to make an offer look and feel tailored to a customer, pulling through their first name or destination city, for example. Relevance determines what to show based on comprehensive customer knowledge.

"One of the biggest gaps that we see is they'll know a lot about the customer and then not utilize that knowledge to make their site more appealing," Donoghue said about retailers. "If I'm logged in and I'm shopping on my desktop and I have the app, you should know that I have the app, and you shouldn't be showing me an offer to drive towards the app."

Avoiding banner blindness through strategic restraint makes offers more effective when they do appear, while poor utilization of existing customer data creates friction and wastes valuable real estate.

For brands looking to test commerce media, the entry point is simpler than building individual partnerships across multiple transaction environments.

"What you put in is what you get out," Donoghue said. "The more, the stronger the data integration can be, and more robust it can be, the better signal we can get, and the faster we can find those high quality customers that they're looking for."

Brands are increasingly integrating predicted LTV as a signal early in the process, seeking faster indicators of customer quality within seven days rather than waiting for longer-term cohort analysis.

Watch the full session.

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