Sam’s Club's new AI tool enables omnichannel ad measurement for brand partners
Sam’s Club has a new, artificial intelligence-based tool for participants in its retail media network to track ad performance.
The warehouse club retailer, a division of Walmart, is releasing a solution called Omni-Impact for its Sam’s Club Member Access Platform (MAP) retail media network.
Omni‑Impact uses deterministic data from the Sam’s Club closed-loop ecosystem to let advertisers see what is driving incremental sales across all MAP on-site and off-site channels and over time.
It also offers a 12-month longitudinal view of campaign performance across MAP channels. To help ensure consistency, Omni‑Impact applies a single, unified methodology across all MAP ad solutions.
As a result, participating brands can use standardized metrics to compare performance across tactics. Omni‑Impact also simulates media mix strategies and delivers predictive budget guidance tailored to each advertiser’s historical performance and category dynamics.
According to Sam’s Club, Omni‑Impact surfaces performance trends across a wide range of audience segments, such as age, household size or membership tiers. The retailer also recently began using first-party data to create personalized experiences through an offering called MAP’s Omni Experiences.
This offering combines digital performance tactics like search and display with immersive experiences in and around media activations via channel, including online and in-store. These experiences can promote large-scale seasonal events, such as back-to-school, as well as smaller brand-led localized events.
Sam’s Club builds up retail media network
Sam’s Club has been bolstering its targeted ad capabilities. The retailer added display ads to the Scan & Go feature of its mobile app in July 2024, and began providing MAP participants full-funnel video advertising onsite, in-app and offsite in December 2023.
[READ MORE: Sam’s Club adds video to retail media network capabilities]
Other MAP features Sam’s Club has deployed in the past couple of years include measurable return on ad spend (ROAS) for omnichannel campaigns and connecting search and sponsored product ads to offline sales, as well as attribution of in-store purchases to advertisers’ search ads.
In addition, Sam’s Club offers the following features to MAP advertisers:
- Brand lift: Incorporates upper-funnel metrics, such as brand preference, favorability and purchase intent, into MAP’s existing conversion reporting. This enables brands to optimize campaigns around objectives such as product launches or new brand positioning.
- Customer lifetime value (CLTV): Integrating CLTV and longitudinal measurement, Sam’s Club intends to help brands better understand the full value of a consumer to refine their media strategies based on buyer segments, behaviors and potential long-term ROI.
- Multi-touch attribution (MTA): This AI-based feature offers unified measurement across all channels in an effort to help brands understand how every touchpoint contributes to conversion, supporting better planning and media mix optimization based on how customers actually move through the path to purchase.
- Propensity modeling with signal fidelity: Utilizing dynamic AI and machine learning, Sam’s Club predicts which MAP members are most likely to engage based on data such as past purchases, product preferences, demographics and shopping behavior. These models adapt based on category (e.g., consumables vs. beauty) and are designed to reduce irrelevant impressions.
What’s ahead
Sam’s Club is optimistic about the future of MAP. According to the retailer, nearly half of new member growth comes from Gen Z and millennial consumers, with about 40% of in-store shoppers engaging with its app or site the week before they buy.
Sam’s Club is also exploring how generative AI can enhance customer experience, including smarter search and personalized product discovery. The goal is to help customers make faster, more informed decisions while enabling discovery.
Bentonville, Ark.-based Sam’s Club, a division of Walmart Inc., operates nearly 600 stores in the U.S. and Puerto Rico.
