Shopper intent and the best live offer rarely point to the same retailer. CPG media plans should weigh both.
During the week of Sept. 14, a 13 oz pack of a national cookie brand was promoted at five Dallas retailers. One drew the most shopper intent. Another offered the lowest price. Which one deserves your ad dollars?
Here is what was live. Tom Thumb and Albertsons at $1.99. Kroger at 2 for $6. Dollar General at 2 for $7. Walgreens at 2 for $10. Same UPC, same city, same seven days, a 151% spread between the lowest and highest promoted price. No single shopper saw all five. Each offer ran in that retailer’s Dallas zone that week, a snapshot rather than a verdict on anyone’s pricing; a higher promoted price can be exactly right for that retailer’s shopper and margin.
ShopLiftr is the off-site performance engine for CPG brands and retailers: we inject live, retailer-verified trade promotions into dynamic ads across display, video, CTV and digital out-of-home, so shoppers see the offer that is actually live nearby. Behind it sits our proprietary database that captures trade promotions across 300+ U.S. retailers, with more than 200,000 active deals refreshed weekly, giving a cross-retailer view of what is on promotion, where and at what price.
Dallas is not an outlier. That same September week, 1,495 branded CPG SKUs ran promotions at three or more U.S. retailers. Ninety percent had more than one price. Four out of 10 showed a price gap of 50% or more.
Now the other signal. MikMak’s purchase-intent data shows where shoppers actually want to buy, measured from real shopping behavior rather than stated preference. In Q2 2026, Walmart took 25.9% of U.S. food and beverage purchase-intent clicks, Instacart 12.2%, Target 9.3%. Retailer preference is real and measurable, and it often has nothing to do with which retailer is running the strongest offer this week.
When you combine these signals, you face the question most media plans ignore: What should your brand do when your shoppers’ preferred retailer isn’t offering the best live promotion?
The gap between the plan and the shelf
Brands lock in retailer priorities months in advance. Promotions shift every week. Shoppers move between banners, and the week’s best offer often goes unnoticed outside a single retailer’s audience. ShopLiftr calls this the off-site performance gap: off-site budgets keep growing, but creative stays fragmented and disconnected from what’s on promotion now and from the shopper ready to act.
Most teams choose one of two paths: follow shopper preference and miss timely offers, or chase the offer and ignore where shoppers already lean. Both leave value on the table.
ShopLiftr’s new guide with MikMak, Aligning Discovery with Deals, brings both signals together and sorts every retailer-and-SKU combination into four planning scenarios. Most brands today face this: strong shopper preference, weaker offer. The preferred retailer still matters, but another retailer is promoting the same SKU at a lower price in the same market. The answer isn’t to switch blindly. Decide deliberately: keep the preferred retailer, expand your retailer set or test the stronger offer in a controlled market. Then measure whether you drove incremental sales or just shifted share.
The guide covers the other three scenarios, a five-step workflow and test design details.
What changes in flight
The comparison is for planning. The ad itself is straightforward. You choose which retailers to feature — this is a strategic decision, not an automated one. ShopLiftr then delivers the live offer for each shopper’s location at your selected retailers, guided first by proximity, then by shopper preference. Proximity makes your message relevant. The live price gives shoppers a reason to act now. MikMak’s shoppable media connects the path to purchase and helps confirm product availability.
Then measure what the campaign changed. In a recent ShopLiftr campaign for a QSR-licensed CPG brand, measured against matched test and control markets with a 52-week baseline and verified through Nielsen Sales Data and Pathformance xAOC, the result was a 7.1% overall sales lift, a 12.3% lift on the hero SKU and $491K in incremental sales on $96,150 in media spend.
Three questions before the next plan
Where is shopper interest concentrated? Where are the live offers, and what job does each one do: defend share, build velocity, drive trial? Where do live offers and shopper intent diverge?
Brands that answer all three questions stop ranking retailers and start following the shopper. Get the full guide here.
What should your brand do when your shoppers and your best offer are in different stores? Join our webinar, Capturing the Deal-Motivated Shopper, with MikMak, ShopLiftr and a leading CPG guest. Thursday, Dec. 3, 10:30 a.m. ET. Register here.
Genevieve Castonguay is VP Marketing at ShopLiftr, the off-site performance engine for CPG brands and retailers.
