MetaRouter, a Cincinnati data infrastructure firm, is powering SKU-level conversion reporting inside Google's Commerce Media Suite, built by a Walmart Ads veteran and a serial founder in a matter of weeks.
Google this week announced that Kroger Precision Marketing is collaborating with Display & Video 360 to bring shopper audience data into YouTube and third-party display inventory - and at the center of the technical architecture sits a relatively little-known Cincinnati company called MetaRouter. The announcement, published on March 24, 2026, by Marta Martinez, Managing Director of Google Marketing Platform, positions MetaRouter as one of two integration partners enabling a new SKU-level conversion reporting capability inside DV360, alongside identity infrastructure provider LiveRamp.
For most brands and agencies, the headline is the Kroger deal. But the more instructive story is how MetaRouter got there, who built it, and what it actually does.
Two LinkedIn posts, published within hours of the Google announcement, reveal the human dimension of a deal that took shape with unusual speed.
Nikhil Raj, MetaRouter's CEO, wrote that it was an "absolute privilege" and that he was "super proud of the engineering and customer success teams in delivering this UNIQUE capability in just a few weeks." That phrase - just a few weeks - is significant. It suggests that when Google and Kroger finalised their partnership terms, MetaRouter had to build and deploy its integration rapidly. Raj credited "outstanding collaboration with the Kroger and 84.51° teams to activate first-party data for targeting and measurement on Google with their Google Marketing Platform," and thanked Google's Bill Reardon and the GMP engineering and partner teams for pushing what he described as "many changes" to support the effort.
Then Raj offered something rarer in corporate announcements: a personal backstory. "For me personally, this journey started at Walmart when we launched WMX back in 2012," he wrote, referring to what became known as Walmart Ads. That platform, which Walmart formally relaunched as Walmart Connect in 2021, was the first retail media product to connect a major grocery and general merchandise retailer's transaction data - both online and in-store - to targeting and measurement across all media. Raj was on the founding team of that system, alongside WalmartLabs. He subsequently worked at Bain as a retail media network specialist, then at Moloco, before joining MetaRouter as CEO in September 2025.
His statement about the Kroger deal was blunt about the ambition: "Now, MetaRouter gets to support all other consumer businesses - airlines, hospitality, banking, insurance, direct-to-consumer, and so on - not just retail - with capabilities to fully control their audience activation and measurement for both Marketing and RMN use cases."
Tim Brunk, MetaRouter's founder, was terser. "Very excited to be under the hood on this one!" he wrote, reposting Raj's announcement. Brunk's LinkedIn profile lists his full portfolio: founder of MetaRouter, Astronomer, Cladwell, and OCEAN - four companies across data infrastructure, workflow automation, fashion technology, and consumer goods. He has 2,907 followers. The post carries no elaboration on the technical details, but the repost signals that for Brunk, this was a milestone moment for the company he started.
MetaRouter is not a media company, a DSP, or a data clean room. Founded in 2018 in Cincinnati, Ohio, the company describes itself as "enterprise-grade customer data infrastructure built for the AI era." Its core product is server-side tag management - a technical approach that routes customer data from a brand or retailer's own systems directly to advertising and analytics platforms, without relying on third-party JavaScript tags running in the user's browser.
According to MetaRouter's company documentation, the platform was originally conceived when a Fortune 50 company faced an ultimatum from its own IT department: remove all third-party tags from the website. Those tags powered marketing and advertising tools that generated billions in revenue. The solution was to partner with MetaRouter to integrate data server-side, allowing IT to limit tag exposure while marketing continued running campaigns without interruption. That founding use case - replacing fragile, browser-based tag infrastructure with a secure, server-hosted pipeline - remains the backbone of what MetaRouter offers today.
The company is owned and operated under Nessa Labs, Inc., according to copyright notices on its website. It employs between 11 and 50 people and maintains two office locations, with headquarters in Cincinnati, Ohio. Despite its small size, MetaRouter claims it is trusted by three of the top ten U.S. retailers.
The integrations library tells a story of deliberate breadth. MetaRouter lists 77 integrations publicly, spanning advertising platforms including Google Ads, Display & Video 360, Google Campaign Manager 360, The Trade Desk, Amazon DSP, TikTok, Snapchat, LinkedIn Ads, Microsoft Ads, and Pinterest, alongside analytics tools such as Amplitude, Mixpanel, and Adobe Analytics, data warehouses including Google BigQuery, Snowflake, Amazon Redshift, Azure Blob, and Databricks, and customer data platforms from ActionIQ to Braze. That breadth of pre-built connectivity is precisely what makes MetaRouter useful as a neutral infrastructure layer inside a complex multi-party data arrangement like the Kroger-Google deal.
According to MetaRouter's LinkedIn post on March 25, 2026, the company described its role as "the privacy-safe backbone connecting retail insights to global media scale," specifically pointing to SKU-level conversion reporting as the key deliverable.
The full technical architecture of the Google Commerce Media Suite integration involves two distinct infrastructure layers working in sequence. LiveRamp provides the identity resolution component - its RampID pseudonymized identifier system matches ad exposure records from Google against Kroger's retail transaction data, without either party directly handling raw personal information about individual shoppers. MetaRouter handles the complementary function: event data routing, moving conversion signals from Kroger's retail systems into Display & Video 360's reporting layer in near real time.
Nikhil Raj's post added a technical detail absent from Google's own announcement: "This approach is unique because of the privacy-safe installation paradigm allowing both online and in-store transactions to be leveraged in real time - as real time as store transactions can be - while ensuring privacy and compliance." That distinction matters. Most digital attribution systems connect ad exposure to online transactions - a purchase on a website or an app. Capturing in-store transactions, which account for the majority of grocery sales at a retailer like Kroger, requires a fundamentally different data flow: one that connects loyalty card swipes or point-of-sale systems to ad platform reporting in near real time, without exposing raw personal data. MetaRouter's server-side routing infrastructure is what closes that loop.
In practice, when a consumer sees a Kroger-targeted ad on YouTube and subsequently buys the specific advertised product at a Kroger store, that purchase event - at the individual SKU level - can now travel through MetaRouter's event-routing infrastructure and surface inside DV360 as a reportable conversion. Previously, connecting a YouTube video impression to a specific grocery store purchase required separate, often manual data workflows that most brands lacked the engineering resources to maintain consistently.
According to Google's announcement, the integration requires no additional setup from brands. That detail is consequential. In earlier generations of retail media measurement, accessing SKU-level attribution required brands to negotiate direct data-sharing agreements with retailers, build technical integrations, and maintain ongoing infrastructure. That operational burden meant SKU-level reporting was accessible primarily to large CPG companies with dedicated data engineering teams. Embedding that capability as standard infrastructure inside DV360 removes those barriers entirely.
Two major CPG companies provided statements to Google alongside the announcement, offering direct operational insight. Kimberly-Clark's VP of Digital Marketing and CX, Luke Kigel, stated that the integration "helps us connect media exposure to purchase behavior and clearly understand how our media drives sales." Unilever North America's Chief Media & Marketing Capability Officer, Ryu Yokoi, described SKU-level reporting as a change that "moves us away from directional metrics towards precise, data-driven decisions that actually move products off the shelves." Yokoi added that bringing Kroger data into Display & Video 360 is "a massive unlock" for Unilever's team, enabling brand and retailer marketing to run in one place.
Both statements point to the same underlying problem: directional metrics - reach, frequency, cost per thousand impressions - have long dominated brand advertising measurement. They indicate whether a campaign is being seen, but not whether it is driving sales at the shelf. That measurement gap has persisted because the data connecting a video impression on YouTube to a specific product purchase at a specific retail chain has historically sat in separate, incompatible systems owned by different parties who had limited incentive to share it in a standardised format.
The timing of the announcement was deliberate. Google and MetaRouter both referenced Shoptalk, the major U.S. retail technology conference held in Las Vegas, as the venue for a more detailed public presentation. MetaRouter's LinkedIn post directed readers to a session featuring Christine Foster "speaking at 10:20 AM PT" on March 25, 2026. Anne Hallock, a professional focused on retail media and agentic commerce, posted a photo from the audience: "Great session on this today at Shoptalk! Andrew Hotz and Christine Foster rocked it." Multiple industry observers responded with congratulations to Raj and Foster specifically, noting the deal had "been in making for a while."
The Shoptalk timing reflects a deliberate commercial strategy. Major retail media deals are routinely announced at industry events where hundreds of potential retail media network clients, CPG brands, and agency buyers are concentrated in one location. Announcing the Google collaboration at Shoptalk maximised immediate visibility with exactly the audience MetaRouter is pitching - retail media networks that want to replicate the Kroger capability with their own first-party data.
Selection as an integration partner in the Google Commerce Media Suite did not arrive without prior groundwork. The company spent several years building technical relationships with the infrastructure components that a deal of this kind requires.
In November 2024, MetaRouter brought its identity resolution features to Google Cloud customers. In April 2025, it achieved Google Cloud Ready - BigQuery designation, a validated technical certification that signals compatibility with Google's cloud infrastructure. That designation, combined with existing DV360, Google Ads, and Google Campaign Manager 360 integrations already in MetaRouter's library, created the technical prerequisites for a partnership of this scope.
The company also moved aggressively to build retail-specific credibility through executive hires. Jeremy King, a former CTO of Walmart, was appointed as a formal advisor in August 2025 - the same month MetaRouter entered the Inc. 5000 list at position 2,826 among America's fastest-growing private companies. Raj himself joined as CEO in September 2025, bringing his Walmart Ads founding experience directly into the organisation. A broader leadership expansion followed in January 2026. According to MetaRouter's press room, the January 27, 2026 announcement specifically framed the hiring as preparation for "global growth in AI-ready marketing and commerce infrastructure."
Walmart Connect's own growth trajectory - with its advertising business reaching $6.4 billion in fiscal year 2026 on 41% growth - provides indirect context for why Raj's background was considered an asset. The person who helped invent the Walmart Ads data architecture in 2012 carries institutional knowledge of exactly the problems MetaRouter is now solving for Kroger. That knowledge informed the design of the privacy-safe installation paradigm that Raj described publicly.
The Kroger deal arrives at a specific moment in the retail media industry's infrastructure development. LiveRamp had already expanded its retail media measurement capabilities to Meta campaigns in October 2025, using clean room infrastructure to connect Meta advertising exposure with retailer sales data. That announcement was adopted by Albertsons Media Collective and Target's Roundel, establishing a parallel track for cross-platform measurement that runs through Meta rather than Google. The Google-Kroger deal is a mirror: it routes through DV360 and YouTube rather than Meta, and uses MetaRouter's event-routing layer rather than a clean room.
DV360's audience reporting expanded in late 2025 to ten distinct categories, adding an explicit Commerce audience dimension. That expansion reflected the platform's increasing investment in retail data integrations and the commercial demand from advertisers for more granular performance classification. Commerce audiences now constitute a formal reporting taxonomy inside DV360, and the Kroger integration is the first significant populated use case under that framework.
Google's earlier privacy-focused DV360 infrastructure investments, including the Publisher Advertiser Identity Reconciliation (PAIR) protocol announced in January 2025, set further technical groundwork. PAIR was adopted as an IAB Tech Lab standard, with over 20,000 publisher domains integrated through LiveRamp's Authenticated Traffic Solution. The Kroger integration builds on that identity infrastructure, extending it from publisher-advertiser matching to retailer-advertiser matching across YouTube and display inventory.
The retail media sector reached $52.44 billion in the United States during 2024, according to industry projections. Retail media spending growth of 22 percent outpaced the broader advertising market's 6.1 percent expansion in 2024. That imbalance has attracted substantial investment from both retailers building media networks and from platforms like Google seeking to capture a share of that spend through their own infrastructure. Retail media spending is projected to exceed $300 billion globally by 2030, according to Omdia. The gap between current scale and that projection is where deals like the Kroger-Google-MetaRouter collaboration are competing to establish lasting positions.
Walmart Connect itself has pushed aggressively on AI-powered advertising tools in 2026, announcing a conversational advertising assistant for Sponsored Search campaigns on January 6, 2026, alongside Sparky integration for agentic commerce. That context matters: the company where Raj cut his teeth on retail media measurement is racing to build the same kind of closed-loop attribution infrastructure that MetaRouter is now helping Kroger deploy through Google. The competition between retail media networks is partly a competition between their underlying data architectures.
Google's Commerce Media Suite extends well beyond the Kroger collaboration. According to the March 24 announcement, brands can currently activate commerce audiences from Best Buy Ads, Costco, Intuit, Kinective Media by United Airlines, Planet Fitness, Shipt, and Western Union across partner inventory in DV360. A coming global expansion will allow eligible brands to leverage commerce audiences from leading Asian marketplaces - including Blinkit, PChome, Shopee, and Swiggy - directly in Google Ads. YouTube's scale provides the backdrop: consumers already watch an average of 90 million hours of shopping-related videos on the platform every day, according to Google's announcement.
The Kroger integration is, at present, the only one within the suite to introduce SKU-level conversion reporting. Other commerce audience partnerships allow targeting but do not yet provide the same granularity of measurement back to the brand. That positions MetaRouter's event-routing infrastructure as a differentiating technical capability - one that, if extended to additional retail partners inside the suite, would expand MetaRouter's commercial footprint significantly.
Nikhil Raj's closing line made the ambition explicit. MetaRouter's stated intent is to offer the same capability it has built for Kroger to airlines, hospitality groups, banks, insurers, and direct-to-consumer brands - any organisation that holds first-party transaction data and wants to route it into advertising platforms for targeting and measurement. The Kroger-Google deal is, in that reading, not the end of MetaRouter's story. It is a proof of concept.
Who: MetaRouter, a Cincinnati-based enterprise data infrastructure company founded in 2018 by Tim Brunk. The current CEO is Nikhil Raj, a founding team member of Walmart Ads (WMX) and former Bain retail media network specialist. Integration partners include LiveRamp for identity resolution. Major CPG brands Kimberly-Clark and Unilever provided validation statements. The announced retail partner is Kroger Precision Marketing, powered by the 84.51° data analytics subsidiary.
What: MetaRouter is one of two infrastructure partners powering Google's new Commerce Media Suite, specifically handling server-side event data routing that enables SKU-level conversion reporting inside Display & Video 360. The capability connects Kroger's online and in-store shopper transaction signals - including loyalty card data and point-of-sale events - to YouTube and display advertising campaigns. Brands can now see which specific products were purchased as a direct result of media exposure, at the individual SKU level, without building or maintaining custom data pipelines.
When: Google's Commerce Media Suite announcement was published on March 24, 2026. MetaRouter's CEO Nikhil Raj confirmed the company's role on LinkedIn the same day, noting the capability was delivered in just a few weeks. The Shoptalk conference presentation by Christine Foster and Andrew Hotz took place on March 25, 2026 at 10:20 AM PT in Las Vegas.
Where: The integration operates across Google's Display & Video 360 platform, connecting Kroger Precision Marketing's retail transaction data - built from loyalty card records and purchase history across Kroger's U.S. store network - to YouTube inventory and third-party display placements. MetaRouter is headquartered in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Why: SKU-level attribution connecting off-site media exposure to individual retail product purchases has been technically complex and operationally inaccessible for most brands. By embedding MetaRouter's server-side event routing and LiveRamp's identity resolution as standard infrastructure inside DV360, Google removes the need for brands to build or maintain custom data pipelines. The approach also captures in-store transactions in near real time - not just e-commerce conversions - closing a measurement gap that has existed since the earliest days of digital advertising. For MetaRouter, the Kroger deal is a proof of concept for extending the same infrastructure to airlines, hospitality, banking, insurance, and direct-to-consumer brands - any organisation that holds first-party transaction data and wants to activate it for advertising measurement.