5 Reasons Full-Funnel Commerce Media Needs Social

Three-quarters of all digital advertising flows to just three channels, and there’s a very good reason for that.

Roughly 75% of digital ad spend is now concentrated in retail media, paid search, and social advertising. These channels sit at the most critical inflection points of the customer journey, operate within the most mature advertising infrastructure available, and offer targeting, optimization, and measurement capabilities that other channels can’t match. We call this convergence “commerce media.” For product companies, this is already the operating reality.

Each of these three pillars plays a distinct and essential role in the commerce media funnel. Retail media and paid search are powerful at capturing existing demand, meeting consumers who are already browsing, searching, and shopping.

Social advertising completes the picture. It creates demand at scale, tells your full brand story through rich creative, and reaches consumers through the people and content they trust most.

Understanding what makes social unique within commerce media is the key to unlocking the full power of all three channels working together.

Social reaches consumers at every stage of the purchase journey

The old purchase funnel is gone. What replaced it isn’t even a loop. It’s more like chutes and ladders. Consumers bounce between discovery, research, browsing, more research, back to discovery, over to a completely different platform, more browsing, and eventually purchase. There’s no predictable sequence. Someone might see a product on TikTok, google it, get distracted, see it again on Instagram three days later, read comments, check Amazon, watch a YouTube review, and then buy it at Target.

The old model let you guide consumers to your doorstep through a relatively orderly series of steps. That world doesn’t exist anymore. Now, you have to participate in the customer journey wherever and whenever it happens. Social shows up at virtually every stage of that chaotic path.

Discovery is the obvious one. Someone scrolling TikTok or Instagram sees a product they didn’t know existed. That’s demand creation, and it’s powerful.

Social’s role doesn’t stop there. Research is increasingly happening on social platforms. Consumers search TikTok and YouTube the way they used to search Google. They’re looking for real people using real products in real contexts. When someone wants to know if a product is actually worth it, they’re watching a creator talk about it, not reading a product description page.

Validation happens on social too. Before pulling the trigger, consumers check comments, look for reviews from people they trust, and scroll through tagged content to see how a product shows up in everyday life. And purchase? Social drives to retailers. The path from “I just saw this on Instagram” to “let me check if Walmart has it” is incredibly short. Social may not always be the point of transaction, but it’s frequently the catalyst that sends someone to a retailer ready to buy.

Social threads through the entire journey in ways that paid search and retail media simply don’t.

What are the unique advantages that social advertising provides your commerce media program?

Social advertising brings capabilities to your commerce media strategy that the other two pillars can’t replicate.

What makes it distinct:

• Social reaches people who aren’t searching for you on engines or retailers
• Audience targeting finds consumers who don’t know about you yet or aren’t thinking about you right now
• Rich creative formats tell your full brand story through sight, sound, and motion
• Social is where culture happens in real time, allowing your brand to be integrated into the channel that shapes and influences daily life for billions of consumers 
• Different platform environments each offer specific tools for solving particular marketing challenges

Each of these advantages compounds when social operates as part of a unified commerce media program.

Social reaches the people who aren’t searching for you on engines or retailers

Here’s the fundamental point that gets missed in channel-level conversations about social: Paid search and most retail media are “pull” channels. They require someone to actively search for something to trigger an ad impression. That’s powerful, and it means you are immediately limited to only the consumers who search for your brand, your category, or whatever other terms you’re bidding on. If nobody searches, your ads don’t run. Every person who doesn’t know about your product, isn’t thinking about your category, or simply hasn’t gotten around to researching yet is invisible to your search and retail media campaigns.

Social is a “push” channel. It has near-infinite inventory that you can proactively put in front of people before they’re looking for anything. You’re not waiting for intent to emerge. You’re creating it.

That YouTube Short that stops someone mid-scroll, that TikTok from a creator they follow, that Instagram Reel that introduces a product they didn’t know existed. Each of those moments generates demand that flows directly into the search queries and retail media impressions that follow.

This dynamic makes social foundational to commerce media.

When social is doing its job well, it expands the total pool of demand that your search and retail media campaigns can capture. When social goes dark, you’re left with your other two channels competing over a fixed, finite audience of people who were already going to search. Your branded search volume drops. Your retail media impressions shrink to category browsers. The entire system contracts.

The bottom line: Social doesn’t just complement search and retail media. It feeds them. Without social generating upstream demand, your other two commerce media pillars are limited to capturing interest that already exists rather than growing it.

Find consumers who don’t know about you yet or aren’t thinking about you right now

Paid search targets intent through keywords. Retail media targets proximity to purchase. Both are valuable, but both require the consumer to act first. If someone doesn’t know your brand exists, or knows about you but isn’t actively shopping your category today, search and retail media have no way to reach them.

Social targets people. The depth and breadth of audience targeting options available on social platforms is unmatched anywhere in commerce media:

• Demographics. Age, gender, income, education, job title, parenting status, household composition
• Interests and affinities. Brand affinities, hobbies, content consumption patterns, lifestyle indicators
• Behaviors. Purchase history, device usage, travel patterns, app activity
• Life events. New job, recent move, upcoming birthday, new relationship, new parent
• Lookalike modeling. Find new audiences that mirror the characteristics of your best existing customers
• Custom audiences. Upload your CRM data to target or suppress existing customers
• Retargeting pools. Re-engage people who’ve visited your site, watched your video, or interacted with your content
• Engagement-based audiences. People who’ve liked, commented, shared, or saved content in your category
• Creator and influencer audiences. Followers of specific creators relevant to your product space
• Contextual signals. Platform activity, content consumption patterns, real-time engagement behavior

This is fundamentally what differentiates social from the other two pillars. You’re not limited to consumers already searching for your category or browsing a retailer’s aisle. You can find the people most likely to care about your product and put your message in front of them while they’re doing something else entirely, before they ever think to search, before they ever walk into a store, before they even know your brand exists.

The bottom line: Search and retail media can only reach people who are already in-market. Social can reach anyone. That’s the difference between capturing existing demand and building new demand from scratch.

Full creative storytelling that makes downstream conversions possible

Search ads are text. Most retail media is a product image with a title and maybe a few bullet points. These formats serve their purpose well at the point of intent and purchase, but they have clear constraints.

A text ad can’t tell your story. A sponsored product listing can’t change how someone thinks about a problem. They have minimal influence over how a consumer perceives your brand, understands your product’s value, or emotionally connects with what you’re selling.

Social gives you sight, sound, and motion (touted for years as a unique hallmark of TV). Full-screen video on social commands attention. Carousel formats walk someone through a product’s benefits step by step. Interactive content invites engagement. Creator-produced content feels native to the platform rather than intrusive. These aren’t just “richer” ad formats but truly different communication tools.

A social ad done well can stay in the mind of your audience long after they scroll past it. It can reframe how they think about a problem they’re trying to solve. It can introduce a new way of approaching a purchase decision they hadn’t fully considered. That kind of influence is what builds the brand preference and product understanding that makes someone choose your product when they eventually land on a retailer’s search results page or browse a category on Amazon. The creative heavy lifting happens on social. The conversion happens downstream. Without the first part, the second part gets significantly harder.

The bottom line: Social is where your brand story gets told in full. That storytelling is what shapes the preference and understanding that makes someone choose you when they get to the search bar or the retail shelf. Text ads and product listings close the sale, but social is what makes the sale closeable.

Social is where culture happens now

Television used to be the dominant cultural force. It was where people discovered new products, learned what was trending, figured out what was cool, and formed shared opinions about the world around them. That role has shifted to social. Social platforms are now the primary place where people learn, share, discover, and engage with the world. It’s where trends start, where products go viral, where conversations happen in real time, and where people go to figure out what matters.

This is a massive deal for advertisers. When you run ads on social, you’re not placing them in some peripheral media environment. You’re showing up inside the cultural engine itself. Your brand exists alongside the content people are actively choosing to spend their time with, in the feeds they check dozens of times a day, woven into the experience they turn to for entertainment, information, and connection.

Creators are a huge part of why this shift happened. They’ve become the trusted voices in a fragmented media landscape, and when a creator recommends a product, it carries weight that no brand message can replicate because it comes wrapped in a relationship the audience has already opted into. You can’t run creator content through a search ad. You can’t embed that kind of credibility into a sponsored product listing. This is unique to social.

The creator advantage extends well beyond direct influencer partnerships. Even if you never work with a single creator directly, social platforms let you build strategies around their ecosystems. You can target the audiences who follow specific creators in your category. You can reach people who like, share, and comment on creator content related to your product space. You can place your ads in feeds alongside the creator content your target audience is already consuming, borrowing context and credibility from the environment itself. The creator economy gives you access to trust and attention at scale, whether through direct partnerships or by strategically engaging the communities that creators have built.

The bottom line: Social has inherited television’s role as the place where culture is made. Advertising on social means your brand participates in that culture rather than interrupting something else. No search ad or product listing can do that.

The “social” channel is more than one thing

“Social” as one channel is misleading. It’s over a dozen unique ecosystems, each with hundreds of millions or billions of active users, each reaching your customer at a different stage, in a different mindset, for a different reason.

Each platform has a unique role to play in telling your brand’s story:

• Facebook. “I’m scrolling through my feed, checking in on groups, seeing what’s new.” The broadest audience in the world, caught in their most habitual daily behavior.
• Instagram. “What would my life look like with this?” Your customer is building an aspirational identity, and your product can be part of the vision.
• TikTok. “I’m just here to be entertained.” They weren’t looking for you, but now they can’t stop thinking about what they just saw.
• YouTube. “I need to see this thing in action before I commit.” A 20-minute review is worth more than every product description page you’ve ever written.
• Snapchat. “This is just between me and my closest people.” An intimate environment where younger audiences let their guard down.
• Pinterest. “I’m planning something and I need ideas.” This person is actively building a shopping list. They’re further down the path than most marketers realize.
• LinkedIn. “I need to solve a business problem.” Your customer is in professional mode, evaluating solutions with budget authority.
• X. “What’s happening right now?” Your customer is plugged into the cultural moment and forming opinions in real time.
• Reddit. “Is this product actually worth it? I want honest advice from real people.” A trust environment no brand can manufacture, and your customer is there right now making decisions.
• Emerging networks. New platforms with highly engaged communities and lower noise. Your competitors probably aren’t there yet.

Each platform puts your customer in a different psychological state. Someone on TikTok is in lean-back entertainment mode. That same person on Pinterest is actively planning a purchase. On LinkedIn, they’re thinking about business challenges. Understanding these contexts lets you surround your customer across multiple platforms and mindsets, crafting messages that meet people where their heads are, not just where their thumbs are.

The bottom line: No other commerce media channel gives you this many distinct environments to reach the same customer. Social lets you show up in the right context, with the right message, across the full range of how your audience actually spends their time online.

Conclusion: Measure social by how it impacts the entire program

We know that in advertising, both online and offline, the further up the funnel an ad impression sits, the harder it is to measure. This can make marketers hesitant about social because the last-click ROAS doesn’t always stack up against search or retail media.

That framing misses the point.

If you believe that commerce media works as a system (and the data says it does), then measuring social in isolation is like measuring your offensive line’s scoring stats. They’re not supposed to score. They’re supposed to make scoring possible. The real question isn’t “what’s social’s ROAS?” It’s “what happens to my commerce media program when social is running well versus when it isn’t?”

Do your branded search queries increase when social campaigns are active? Do your retail media conversion rates improve? Does your overall cost per acquisition come down? These are the signals that tell you whether social is doing its job within the system. The marketer who cuts social spend because its standalone ROAS looks weak, then watches branded search volume decline and retail media efficiency erode, has learned this lesson the expensive way. Social’s impact should be measured by program effectiveness, not channel-level attribution.

Commerce media is a system where retail media, paid search, and social advertising create a flywheel effect, each one feeding momentum to the others. A consumer sees a product in an Instagram Reel, googles it to learn more, checks Amazon to compare options, watches a TikTok creator review it, searches again with more specific terms, and buys it on their Walmart app. Every step builds on the one before it, and social is what starts the flywheel spinning. If you’re building a commerce media program and social isn’t a core pillar, it’s worth asking what that gap is costing the rest of your investment.

Skai’s Paid Social solutions help marketers run more agile, accountable campaigns across all leading social platforms. As part of your commerce media program, Skai connects paid social to retail media and search, enabling smarter targeting, continuous optimization, and faster pivots based on real-world performance.

Ready to see how it works? Schedule a quick demo.

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