Vlad Zhovtenko, CEO and co-founder of RedTrack explains why ecommerce retailers are losing visibility into paid advertising (and how to fix it).
There are big problems, and then there are $210 billion problems. Global ecommerce is dealing with the latter.
Between nine and twelve million independent ecommerce retailers now rely on paid digital advertising as a primary growth engine, and together they spend roughly $210 billion annually on these ads. On the receiving end of that cash cow? Google and Meta and virtually no one else.
Even among the businesses spending the highest amounts on paid digital advertising, confidence in what that spending actually delivers has completely eroded. More spending has somehow created less confidence in the results. Paradoxically, as ad spend has grown, clarity has declined.
And these budgets are most certainly growing. According to dentsu’s Global Ad Spend Forecasts, global ad spend is growing faster than the larger global economy, and is expected to surpass $1 trillion in 2026 for the first time. Automated systems and algorithms increasingly determine what consumers see, click on, and buy. If you’re a large brand, this shift underscores the importance of data infrastructure. If you’re a small or midsize business, this exposes a dangerous vulnerability that needs addressing immediately.
However it is delivered, paid advertising hasn’t stopped working, but its underlying system no longer fits an environment of first-party data, server-side architectures, and algorithmic decision-making at scale. Small and midsize brands have been the first to suffer from this shift.
How data ownership broke advertising
Privacy regulation, cookie deprecation, and ad blockers usually get blamed for breaking performance marketing. In this narrative, data ownership gets off scot-free, and it shouldn’t.
Small retailers once outsourced data responsibility to pixels, tags, and browser-based scripts. Third-party tools were home to attribution, and optimization logic lived inside ad platforms. Owning the underlying data was largely optional. Those days are gone.
Today’s advertising systems depend on fast, reliable, first-party data signals. Conversion events must be captured server-side, enriched with first-party data, and subsequently returned to platforms to fuel optimization in real time. Enterprises recognized this shift early and responded by rebuilding their data foundations from the ground up. Small and midsize businesses weren’t equipped with the same tools to adapt to this ecosystem shift. That doesn’t mean they are locked out of the new opportunities it has created.
The stack lacks resources for small brands
To absorb the shock of ecosystem change, large advertisers poured money into internal data teams, custom integrations, and proprietary measurement frameworks. They swapped third-party signals with first-party infrastructure.
Most measurement and martech platforms still assume their end user has the budget to support a host of dedicated analytics and engineering resources and the ability to tolerate operational complexity. Virtually no small businesses fit this profile, and the mismatch leaves them in a bind, forced to either overpay for tools they can’t fully operate or fly blind.
Lack of data ownership creates its own issues like delayed and fragmented attribution and contradictory reports. If (and when) attribution breaks down, smaller companies lose the ability to assess which channels are driving incremental revenue. This inevitably pushes retailers into a single-channel trap, as they concentrate the bulk of their investment on whichever platform appears to perform best. Lacking clear insight into the overlap between channels or the true contribution of each touchpoint, diversification becomes too big of a risk. This is the opposite of a perfect solution, since acquisition just gets more expensive as efficiency plummets.
Modern advertising is now optimised for machines instead of people. Ad platforms are AI systems competing on signal density and signal reliability. In that environment, data ownership is essential to determine algorithmic performance.
The enterprise playbook is no longer optional
The uncomfortable reality is that small and midsize ecommerce brands now require enterprise-grade data capabilities just to stay competitive. Everything that was once optional—first-party data collection, server-side tracking, consent-aware signal routing, and real-time integrations—is now the foundation of a modern paid ads stack. In other words, the level of data sophistication once reserved for global brands is now mandatory for everyone. Whether it is a specialty coffee roaster in Central Europe or a direct-to-consumer skincare brand in the Baltics, the fundamentals are the same. Absent trustworthy data, you’re left with guesswork.
Asking millions of small retailers to independently build what enterprises assemble with entire teams is neither realistic nor healthy for the ecosystem. The barrier to data ownership needs to be lowered, and that’s starting to happen. The time for these companies to claim ownership of their data is now.
Global ad spend is hurtling toward the trillion-dollar mark, and making advertising more automated and more unforgiving to weak signals as it approaches. How can we make that enterprise-level data infrastructure accessible to small brands? We re-architect the stack around first-party data ownership.
Solutions that are structurally misaligned with how modern advertising works will, in time, fail. For small and midsize e-commerce brands, the future of paid growth hinges on reclaiming control of their data by rebuilding the stack around it.
Better creatives and bigger budgets won’t determine the next five years of ecommerce performance. Success will depend on a company’s ability to collect, process, and access high-quality data. Those that own their data layer can do this best and are bound to win. The rest will fund the platforms without understanding why performance deteriorates.
Stay informed
Our editor carefully curates two newsletters a week filled with up-to-date news, analysis and research. Click here to subscribe to the FREE newsletter sent straight to your inbox. Why not follow us on LinkedIn to receive the latest updates on our research and analysis?
