Gopuff Scales Its Ad Measurement as Brands Demand Clear ROI
When grocery delivery company Gopuff launched its Gopuff Ads platform in 2023, it partnered with Koddi to develop tools that could help brands quantify the impact of their ad spend and optimize their campaigns. Almost three years later, the collaboration has grown from a pilot program to an always-on measurement tool that allows brands to track the long-term impact of their campaigns.
“As budgets tighten across the commerce media landscape and businesses continue to navigate an uncertain economic climate, advertisers increasingly want clear, quantifiable proof that their spend is driving net-new demand,” JR Crosby, Gopuff director of adtech and data partnerships, told the Path to Purchase Institute. “It’s not just about reaching the right person anymore; it’s about validating that the media actually changed their behavior.”
Koddi’s testing framework draws from a cross-section of Gopuff’s users, controlling for loyalty and engagement. During the pilot, they coordinated with select advertisers to validate the results, refining their methods before scaling the program. In the first few months of 2026, Gopuff has already exceeded the total volume of tests conducted during all of 2025. Koddi’s tools analyze ad exposure and conversion data to measure incremental conversions, revenue and ROAS, providing immediate insights that can be used to plan budgets.
“The biggest challenge wasn't actually the tech — it was the learning curve on interpreting the output,” Crosby said. “These were entirely new reports for us, so we had to train ourselves to look at campaign performance with a completely different set of eyes. The results were great, but we had to be sure we were reading the signals correctly and not just defaulting to the ROAS-centric view we were used to. The real work was in that internal synthesis.”
Even the definition of incrementality isn’t universally accepted. The methodology for data collection fell into place naturally once Gopuff could establish what the term meant on their platform.
“ROAS on its own is not enough,” Crosby said. “Advertisers want to prove that the money they’re spending is driving incremental conversions, and they want the ability to separate those conversions from purchases that would have happened organically, whether or not the consumer saw an ad. In short, we, as an industry, needed a closed-loop measurement system that isolates the impact of an ad from organic shopper behavior.”
Learning Curves
Another challenge has been educating advertisers on how to use their data to better measure their success instead of relying on traditional ROAS metrics.
“The biggest lesson was that while the math needs to be complex, the output needs to be simple,” Crosby said. “We learned that, for this to scale, we can't deliver a Ph.D. thesis every time. We need to standardize the framework so that the results — 'You spent $X and got Y incremental sales' — are immediate and digestible.”
Gopuff and Koddi are extending the program and adding self-service access to the testing and reporting to make it easier for advertisers to use the tool. They can now also track users for up to 270 days following the test period to measure long-term impact.
This has proved the long tail of Gopuff Ads, with a 55% increase in transactions and revenue for users who were exposed to ads compared to the control group. The tool has become a competitive advantage for Gopuff compared to other retail media platforms.
“By better understanding ad exposure, engagement and conversion behaviors, brands can optimize for growth and gather learnings to inform even more impactful campaigns going forward,” Crosby said.
