Groundscore
Image default
Business

Criteo: why personalized retargeting is so important

On e-commerce websites, only 2 or 3 percent of the visits lead to a sale. The reason for this is that many users have not decided to purchase anything. Online advertisers have developed a strategy called retargeting. It displays products to users that are similar to ones they have previously clicked on. For example, if you click on a ribbon, you’ll see banners and pop-ups with different ribbons.

Criteo is the leader of dynamic retargeting. Static retargeting was the main solution until Criteo ads came with its innovative technology. Rather than targeting people who have previously visited the same website with the same ad, Criteo has developed capabilities to choose 1) the more interesting customers to target, 2) the best time to do so, and 3) generate the most appealing ad.

Facebook’s data-driven approach is their main source. They track user behavior through cookies and then update profiles of users and products to better their algorithm. The infrastructure allows them to test new machine-learning models and see which performs best. This typically happens without any human intervention, but Facebook monitors around 700 A/B tests a year. In 2018, there were only eight instances where a human intervened. Criteo has a wide range of customers, from online retailers and brands like you to local restaurants and banks. What does Criteo do for these different types of businesses? It gives them access to efficient advertising, customized for every single user. This allows them to increase their business by increasing engagement of the ads thirteen times on average.

If you want to compare these different sources, we recommend checking out software like Google Data Studio or Salesforce Marketing Cloud Intelligence to be able to gather data and compare them in dashboards.

Criteo originally worked with customers bidding on advertising campaigns. Now, the service Criteo offers is much more diverse and covers different types of online advertising: pay-per-click, for example, but also contextual, behavioral, and video. Criteo, a major company in the digital advertising industry, faces major disruption. The company has been threatened by Apple and Google’s decision to block third parties’ cookies on browsers and decrease Criteo’s data sources. Criteo has taken measures to try to minimize the adverse effects of these two announcements by developing new ways to rely less on cookies.