Retail-Media Beauty Wars: Amazon’s Ad Boom vs. Ulta & Sephora—Are You Double-Counting Sales?

In the race for retail media dollars, Amazon is setting an unprecedented pace. Projected to hit $69 billion in ad revenue this year, Amazon has firmly established itself as the dominant player. But it’s far from alone: beauty specialists Ulta and Sephora are rapidly expanding their own retail media offerings, turning every product page into a battleground for beauty brands vying for attention.

While this retail-media explosion promises marketers increased visibility and potential sales, it comes with significant hidden costs—primarily around fragmented and overlapping attribution. The critical question beauty marketers must now ask: Are these retail media networks genuinely creating incremental growth, or are they simply double (or even triple) counting sales?

Why the Retail Media Frenzy Matters for Beauty

Retail media, defined as ads served directly through retailer platforms, is incredibly attractive for beauty brands. After all, customers actively shopping are much closer to purchasing—making retail media ads inherently compelling. Amazon, with its deep data reserves and robust targeting capabilities, has understandably captured a vast share of beauty marketers' budgets. Not to be outdone, Ulta and Sephora have aggressively built out their own ad capabilities to monetize their substantial beauty-focused traffic.

Yet the growing reliance on multiple retailer platforms has created an increasingly fragmented attribution landscape. Marketers running simultaneous campaigns on Amazon, Sephora, and Ulta often find each platform independently attributing sales, inflating apparent ROAS and muddying the clarity around campaign performance.

The Hidden Cost of Fragmented Attribution

In a perfect world, attribution would clearly identify the channels and tactics driving incremental growth. In reality, retail media networks predominantly operate as closed ecosystems. Amazon attributes sales made on Amazon; Ulta attributes Ulta sales, and Sephora does the same. The problem? When a shopper interacts with ads across multiple platforms, each platform claims credit for the sale, leading to overstated performance metrics and skewed budget allocations.

This attribution gap is especially pronounced in beauty, where shoppers routinely browse multiple platforms and social media before committing to a purchase. Consequently, marketers risk over-investing in lower-funnel retail ads, inadvertently neglecting the top-of-funnel brand-building activities essential for sustained long-term growth.

Why Platform-Native Analytics Fall Short

Retail platforms naturally incentivize marketers to spend more within their own ecosystems. Their analytics tools are optimized to report internal results, not cross-channel realities. As a result, relying solely on platform-native analytics perpetuates a cycle of over-crediting and misallocation of marketing dollars.

For senior marketers at beauty DTC brands, such as Babe Original, the challenge is clear: accurately understanding channel interplay and genuinely incremental impacts is becoming nearly impossible with traditional attribution models.

The Smarter Path: Independent Measurement and Incrementality Testing

To overcome this attribution blind spot, savvy marketers are increasingly turning to independent measurement methodologies. Techniques such as Media Mix Modeling (MMM), incrementality testing, and blended attribution models allow brands to analyze performance holistically and objectively. These methodologies factor in broader market signals, upper-funnel activities, and competitive actions to clarify true incremental lift rather than merely last-click credit.

The move towards privacy-first measurement also aligns perfectly with the tightening data privacy landscape—enabling brands to remain compliant without losing clarity on their marketing performance.

How Leading Beauty Brands Are Already Navigating This Challenge

Forward-thinking beauty brands have already begun adopting these neutral measurement frameworks. Instead of relying exclusively on retailer-provided metrics, they use third-party attribution providers and incrementality experiments to recalibrate their media strategies continually. These marketers understand that real ROI comes from knowing precisely which levers to pull—not just who claims the final click.

The Bottom Line for Beauty Marketers

Retail media isn't slowing down; in fact, it’s accelerating. However, its true value to beauty marketers depends entirely on seeing clearly through the fragmented attribution haze. The brands that invest in unbiased, holistic measurement approaches today will be the ones leading the market tomorrow.

Before allocating your next quarter’s media spend, consider this your call to scrutinize and challenge your retail-media metrics. After all, visibility is powerful—but clarity is decisive.