Why retail media beats standalone marketplace listings
A product page on Daraz or Amazon is a shelf. Sponsored listings move that shelf to the eye-level spot a buyer is already scanning — the top of search, the sponsored row, the related-products carousel. Retail media advertising is the discipline of buying those placements profitably, then proving the spend drove an order that would not have happened anyway.
It works for the same reason it is easy to waste money on: the buyer is already inside the marketplace with intent to buy, so bad listings and sloppy bidding show up immediately in weak conversion and a TACoS that climbs week on week.
WeProms runs retail media for Pakistani brands selling on Daraz, exporters selling on Amazon US and UAE, and retailers advertising on their own or partner sites through Criteo. The work is always a loop — bid, measure attributed sales, fix the listing, bid again — never a set-and-forget campaign.
The marketplaces that matter in Pakistan
The networks we spend most of our time inside:
- Daraz Ads — the dominant marketplace in Pakistan, where sponsored products and search placement decide whether a brand appears during 11.11, Big Friday, and the weekly flash sales.
- Amazon Ads — Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, and Sponsored Display for Pakistani exporters and DTC brands selling into Amazon US, UK, and UAE.
- Walmart Connect and Foodpanda ads — for brands with the right catalogue and geography.
- Criteo commerce media — on-site retail media for brands advertising on a retailer’s own storefront.
The choice of network follows where your customers already buy, not the other way around. We will not push Amazon for a brand whose buyers live on Daraz.
TACoS and iROAS — the two numbers we run everything against
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Most marketplace sellers learn ACoS early: advertising cost divided by ad-attributed sales inside one campaign. It is useful but incomplete. A campaign can show a healthy ACoS while quietly cannibalising sales your organic ranking would have produced for free.
That is why we manage to TACoS (Total Advertising Cost of Sales) — ad spend divided by total sales, organic plus paid — and to iROAS (incremental return on ad spend), which tries to answer the harder question: how many of those attributed orders would have happened without the ad?
Before we change a single bid, we agree a TACoS ceiling with you, grounded in product margins. A 15% margin SKU cannot sustain the same ad pressure as a 40% margin SKU, and the campaign structure has to reflect that — separate campaigns, separate budgets, separate targets.
Catalogue work that makes the ad spend convert
Retail media lives or dies on the listing. You can bid to the top of search on Daraz and still lose the sale if the title is thin, the bullets are empty, the images are weak, or the page is out of stock. So a meaningful part of this engagement is not advertising at all — it is catalogue work:
- Titles engineered for the marketplace search algorithm, front-loading the terms buyers actually type.
- Backend keywords and attributes filled correctly so the product surfaces in filters.
- A+ Content and brand store pages on Amazon that make a first-time visitor trust the brand enough to convert.
- Inventory health checks, because running ads against an out-of-stock SKU wastes spend and damages listing rank.
If the listings need fixing, we front-load that work. Sending paid traffic to a thin page is the most common way retail media budget is wasted.
Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, and Sponsored Display
Within each marketplace we work across the three core ad formats:
- Sponsored Products — the workhorse, targeting keyword and ASIN or SKU targets, with placement modifiers that push more budget to top-of-search where conversion is highest.
- Sponsored Brands — video and store-linked formats that build recall on category and branded search.
- Sponsored Display — audience and category targeting that reaches shoppers who viewed a product but did not buy, on and off the marketplace.
We run tight negative-keyword lists from day one. Marketplace auto-campaigns without negatives are the fastest way to spend on irrelevant and competitor terms, and we parse search-term reports weekly to prune them.
Closed-loop reporting and incrementality
How we helped a Pakistani business achieve measurable results.
The advantage of retail media over most paid channels is closed-loop attribution: the retailer knows the order happened, and ties it back to the ad. We turn that into reporting finance can read — a Looker Studio or GA4 dashboard showing attributed sales, iROAS, new-to-brand share, and the organic-vs-paid split by SKU.
Where the data allows, we set up incrementality holdouts — geographies or ASINs held back from ads — so you can see the lift the spend actually created, not just the orders it was credited with.
If you sell on Daraz, Amazon, or your own retail site and the ad spend feels like a black box, talk to us about a retail media audit. We will show you where budget is leaking and what a TACoS-led plan would look like for your catalogue.
