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Learn how Rokt can help make the most of the Transaction Moment™

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Most ad budgets are built around the click. The cart. The checkout page. And then they stop. At the EMARKETER Ad Buyer Strategies Summit in New York City, Sophie Donoghue, SVP of Client Success at Rokt, joined EMARKETER's Suzy Davidkhanian for a fireside discussion that challenged that assumption and made the case for what comes next.

The Transaction Moment is not the finish line

When a customer is actively completing a purchase online, they are at peak intent. They have their credit card out. They have made a decision. But according to Sophie, that moment, what Rokt calls the Transaction Moment™, is consistently overlooked by marketers who treat it as a period rather than an opening.

"The post-purchase page is something partners don't even think about," Sophie told the audience. "They're like, 'We've got the order we want.'"

That gap is the opportunity. The Transaction Moment spans the full selection-to-confirmation window, from cart through payment to the post-purchase page, and it is one of the few places online where a customer is both highly attentive and genuinely open to what comes next. Rokt's network now processes 10 billion transactions annually across verticals including retail, travel, food delivery, ticketing, and rideshare, giving brands access to this window at significant scale.

A new pillar in performance marketing

Sophie was direct about where Rokt fits, and where it does not. Search, social, and affiliate are well-established channels. Rokt is not a variation on any of them. The better frame is a fourth bucket: shopping, and specifically the Transactional Moment within it.

"Think of us as a performance marketing channel that's measurable and incremental," she said. "There's never a clearer sign that someone is open to a new offer than when they're literally buying something."

For performance marketers, that distinction matters. Rokt consistently delivers against CPA, ROAS, and LTV goals, but what brands keep discovering is that the customers they find are net new, people their existing channels never reached. The conversation that starts with "can you hit our goal" quickly becomes "how do we scale."

Incrementality is the real story

The session kept returning to one word: incremental. And with good reason. Sophie described the pattern that plays out with brand after brand: they come in asking whether the channel works, then realize the customers arriving through Rokt are ones they had not found anywhere else.

"We play a top-of-funnel role in the sense that the customer wasn't necessarily looking for that introduction to that brand," Sophie explained, "but with bottom-of-the-funnel performance outcomes."

This dual role, discovery with conversion intent, is what separates the Transaction Moment from passive impression-based channels. The customer is already in a buying mindset. They have demonstrated intent with their wallet, not just their cursor.

Sophie expanded on this thinking in a piece she authored for EMARKETER shortly after the summit. In it, she makes the case that transaction environments are powered by deterministic, real-time customer behavior rather than the probabilistic targeting that underlies most open web and social channels. That signal quality is what makes incrementality in this context real and measurable, not assumed. As she wrote, efficiency alone is no longer enough: brands are being asked to prove that media investments drive outcomes that would not have happened anyway. The Transaction Moment, with its closed-loop visibility into confirmed purchase behavior, is where that proof becomes possible.

One example that landed in the room that day: a satellite radio brand saw strong incremental results running within a quick-service restaurant's post-purchase environment. The reason, which only became obvious on reflection, was that customers at drive-through QSRs are, by definition, in their cars. That insight opened an entirely new targeting logic for mobility-adjacent brands, from car insurance to gas offers, built entirely from behavioral context rather than assumed demographics.

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Read the full transcript

You can acquire customers while they shop by placing your brand inside premium e-commerce transactions right at the moment of purchase. High intent, exclusive network, brand safe. Traditional digital ads are disruptive and expensive. With our CPC model, you only pay for outcomes. Ensure relevance without wasted impressions.

When we talk about the transaction moment, it's really any time that a customer is buying or making that action online — from the moment they put something in their cart all through to the purchase page, and then all the way to that post-purchase moment. And why we're so excited about it is it's incredibly high intent. They're going through that environment to make that purchase, but they're also really open to exploring what's the next thing they should be interested in. They're happy. They've got their credit card out. They've got endorphins running.

What the role that Rokt will play is: what's the next best thing we should show, and how do we make it really relevant and not disruptive?

The transaction moment is really more a sequential buying mindset. It can show up when you're buying a movie ticket, jumping in an Uber or a Lyft, buying a plane ticket, or Venmo-ing a friend. There are all these moments that are really powerful to tap into. We've been able to unlock a network of 10 billion transactions annually across all different verticals.

While it's sometimes really important what site they're on — if you're buying a ticket on Ticketmaster, you might get a Loop headphones offer — sometimes it's more just about who that person actually is. The same person buying that ticket on Ticketmaster is also ordering food on Grubhub or jumping in that Uber. We can find them wherever they are and serve them something relevant.

There are very pre-established buckets in performance marketing — search, social, affiliate. We recognize that we don't fit into any of those buckets, and it's actually quite intentional. We visualize ourselves as the fourth bucket: shopping. It's really been underutilized, and that's a huge opportunity for brands. Performance marketers should think of us as a measurable and incremental channel.

In this time of economic uncertainty, there's never a clearer sign that someone is open to a new offer than when they're literally buying something. It's a really active environment versus passive scrolling.

Pretty much every brand that comes to us has a CPA, ROAS, or LTV KPI they're working towards. The first thing we always want to prove out is that yes, we can hit that goal efficiently. And then what we hear from a lot of brands is: "This channel is really incremental — these are different customers we haven't been able to find before." The conversation quickly pivots from "does it work" to "can we scale."

We're sort of top of the funnel in the sense that the customer wasn't necessarily looking for that introduction to that brand — but with bottom-of-the-funnel performance outcomes. We play that dual role.

One of our partners is Fanatics. You would assume that's largely a male audience, but in reality it's largely female — women buying gifts for their children or partners. That's always an interesting tidbit, and often why we're so incremental: it's places brands haven't thought to look before.

We also work with Sonic. When they went live, one of the biggest advertisers seeing great results was Sirius XM. You drive through Sonic — so Sirius XM was a natural fit. And then we started thinking about other environments where people are driving: car insurance, gas offers. Sonic shifted from being a QSR partner to being really powerful for anyone in a car.

We've also got AMC, Regal — pretty much all of the cinemas. We see customers at all different moments, whether they're jumping in a Lyft to go to the cinema or ordering food to pick up on the way. What we're really trying to do is be thoughtful about when we show the customer something, make sure it's highly relevant, and avoid overloading them.

At Rokt, we play the role of trusted intermediary between three parties: the partner, the advertiser, and the customer. We use first-party data from both the partner and the advertiser — does that customer already have that product? Where are they? What are they buying? What time of day is it? What city are they in? All of that informs what's relevant to show them. We can also pull through their first name or the destination city they're traveling to — things that add that extra personalized touch.

And sometimes we recognize the best thing to show is nothing at all. Some partners have customers who come through multiple times a week or even multiple times a day. Sometimes it's best not to show something so that when you do, the customer actually notices it — and you avoid banner blindness.

One of the biggest gaps we see: brands know a lot about the customer and then don't utilize that knowledge. If I'm logged in and I have the app but I'm shopping on desktop, you should know I have the app and shouldn't be showing me a prompt to download it. That's a waste of real estate and a poor customer experience.

We've done the hard yards of building a network of 10 billion transactions. You don't have to go directly to Macy's, Ticketmaster, or Gap to do a deal. We have the full network, and all you need to do is integrate one time.

The very first conversation we'll have with any brand is: "What is your goal? What are you trying to achieve?" We'll be really open about what we see in your industry, what outcomes we're achieving, and what that growth could look like. We're also in 16 global markets — come and have a chat.

The more robust the data integration, the better signal we can get and the faster we can find those high-quality customers. In addition to CPA and ROAS goals, we're hearing more and more about LTV and predicted LTV — brands are choosing to integrate that as a signal early so they can get a faster read within seven days.

Relevance over volume

Scale without relevance is noise. Sophie was clear that Rokt's role is to act as a trusted intermediary for three parties at once: the partner site, the advertiser, and the customer. That means the system draws on first-party data from both sides of the transaction to assess whether an offer is worth showing at all.

Does the customer already have the product? What are they buying right now? What time of day is it? Where are they? For high-frequency partners with customers who transact multiple times a week, the right answer is sometimes to show nothing. Protecting the customer's attention is what makes the next impression count.

"The best thing to show is sometimes nothing at all," Sophie said.

Personalization adds another layer, but as Sophie noted in her EMARKETER piece, what actually resonates is contextual relevance rather than audience matching alone. A travel confirmation page may present an opening for a complementary financial service. A retail purchase could unlock a relevant subscription or loyalty offer. The value comes from timing and context. Consumers increasingly tune out experiences that feel overly targeted or disruptive, and the Transaction Moment works precisely because the message fits what a customer is actively doing.

What this means for ad buyers

The session closed with a direct message for brands still sitting on the sidelines: the infrastructure already exists. Rokt has built the network across 10 billion annual transactions. Brands integrate once and get access to the full breadth of it, without individual deals with ticketing platforms, apparel retailers, department stores, or anyone else.

What separates brands that scale quickly from those that do not is data quality and signal strength. The more robust the integration, the faster Rokt's AI can identify the right customers. Increasingly, brands are passing predicted LTV as an early signal, recognizing that a seven-day window needs a faster feedback loop than traditional conversion data provides.

The channel is measurable, incremental, and available at the moment when buyer intent is highest. For brands still treating checkout as the end of the customer journey, the question worth asking is: what are you leaving behind?

Read Sophie's full EMARKETER piece, "Why the Transaction Moment Drives Incrementality," for a deeper look at the signal quality and measurement case behind the channel. 

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