The French digital advertising market reached a new level in the first half of 2026: budgets are shifting towards social video and retail media, while traditional display formats are losing ground. This redistribution of investments poses a concrete problem for advertisers publishing online ads, as their measurement tools have not yet caught up with the fragmentation of purchasing journeys.
Measuring ad performance when journeys escape traditional search
For years, the dominant attribution model relied on clicks from a search engine. A user would type a query into Google, click on an ad, and make a purchase. The path was linear, traceable, and easily valued.
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This model no longer reflects the reality of a journey that starts on TikTok, passes through a conversational chatbot like ChatGPT, and ends up on a marketplace. Measurement tools remain focused on the last click, while the purchasing decision is built much earlier, on social platforms where attention is captured by short videos or influencer recommendations.
Retail media further complicates the picture: in the first half of 2026, this lever reached 775 million euros in France, up 18%. Advertisers are investing heavily, but conversion data remains siloed within each ecosystem (Amazon, Carrefour, Cdiscount). Cross-referencing this data with that of a TikTok campaign or a journey initiated by an AI assistant is still a makeshift effort.
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To follow the news on 100 Pour 100 Annonces, it is better to understand this context of fragmentation, as it conditions how each ad generates measurable returns.
Social video and display: the budget shift in digital advertising
Traditional display banners are down about 5% for the semester. This is not a cyclical accident. Classic display formats are losing effectiveness against short video, which captures more attention on the news feeds of Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube Shorts.
This shift has direct consequences for ad creation. Brands that continue to produce static visuals for their display campaigns find themselves out of sync with user behaviors, who are continuously scrolling through video feeds.
What social video changes for advertisers
Producing a six-second video ad for TikTok is nothing like designing a 300×250 banner. Format constraints impose an immediate message, a vertical framing, and often a tone close to organic content. Advertisers who master these codes see their engagement rates significantly increase compared to classic formats.
The problem is that social video is more expensive to produce and more expensive to distribute. Bids for video placements are rising, driven by demand from brands reallocating their display budgets. For an advertiser managing a volume of online ads, calculating profitability becomes more complex than a simple cost per click.
Retail media: an advertising channel that redistributes the rules of marketing
Retail media refers to advertising displayed directly on retailers’ sites and apps. When a cosmetics brand pays to appear at the top of the results on a major retailer’s site, that’s retail media.
With 775 million euros captured in the first half of 2026, this channel is no longer a supplementary role. It absorbs an increasing share of budgets that previously went to Google Ads or programmatic display. The reason is simple: retail media reaches the user at the exact moment of purchase intent, just a few clicks away from the cart.
The current limitations of retail media for advertisers
- Performance data remains locked within each retailer platform, with no standardization of metrics between them
- Small advertisers struggle to access premium placements, often dominated by large brands with higher budgets
- Attributing the sale to the right advertising lever remains approximate when the customer has been exposed to an Instagram ad, then a retail media ad, before finalizing their purchase
Online ads and conversational engines: a blind spot in measurement
ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews: conversational engines are changing how users search for a product or service. Instead of typing a short query and comparing links, a growing share of customers ask a question in natural language and receive a synthetic answer.
For advertisers, this change creates a blind spot. No standard tool measures the influence of a mention in an AI response on the final conversion. If ChatGPT recommends a product and the user then goes directly to the brand’s site, this visit will be counted as direct traffic, not as a conversion attributable to a campaign.
Brands investing in content optimized for conversational engines (detailed articles, rich product sheets, structured data) see an increase in their visibility in these responses. The return on investment remains difficult to quantify with current tools.
What advertisers can do right now
- Implement granular UTM tracking to distinguish traffic from different conversational sources
- Monitor brand queries in Google Search Console after each video or social campaign, as a spike in brand searches often signals upstream exposure on another channel
- Test multi-touch attribution models rather than relying on last-click, even if these models remain imperfect
- Structure product sheets and web content to maximize the chances of appearing in AI-generated responses
The fragmentation of purchasing journeys between social video, retail media, and conversational engines is not a passing trend. Advertisers who continue to manage their campaigns using only traditional search indicators risk underestimating channels that already play a significant role in the purchasing decision. Adapting measurement tools to this reality becomes an operational priority, not a theoretical subject.