How Criteo optimizes your ads

Criteo’s ads are powered by Dynamic Creative Optimization+ technology. This means your banners are dynamically constructed in the microseconds before they’re displayed to a potential customer.

When an opportunity for your campaign arises, DCO+ chooses the design elements that will build the best-performing ad for that potential customer and context.

Some of these elements include:

• Format: The size or format of the ad (e.g. 300x250)

• Pagination: If the ad shows multiple products, this is how the ad will change from one page of products to another page on the banner

• Focus: If the ad shows multiple products, this is how the ad might zoom in to “focus” on one specific product

• Grid: How to align the products next to each other

• Product view: The arrangement of the different elements within one product display on the banner. It controls whether the product displayed includes title, price, description and how that information is shown

Additionally, for each ad, the engine will choose how to display the following information:

• Product name

• Price and discounted price

• Product image

• CTA

Previewing your ads

In the creative preview, you will see different examples of how ads might look like as your potential customers browse the web.

You can choose certain design elements like your logo, font, and color. Our Dynamic Creative Optimization+ technology will adapt your ads to fit a variety of screens and content.

In the preview, you can explore what those different ad formats might look like. There are a few different sections.

IAB Standard: Banner formats that adhere to the IAB Ad Unit Portfolio

Mobile: Banner formats that will be used on our mobile inventory

Additional: These are rarely used formats for very specific inventory.

Custom: Here, you can play around with all the different elements that are available to our DCO+ engine. This will give you an idea of the possible variations.

It is impossible to show all combinations, so you will only see examples.

Why your ads have so many variations

 DCO+ uses machine learning to generate and display the banners that will perform the best for your campaign, based on each specific user and their click behavior.

For example, if the engine knows that a customer is more likely to click on a banner without an image, it will adjust the banners accordingly. 

This is how your campaigns achieve a unique reach and CTR.

Optimizing your ads

For optimal campaign performance, Criteo recommends not limiting your display opportunities.

Since ads adapt to a variety of environments and customer preferences, it’s not possible to display particular elements for all formats, or to use one design for one format but another design for a different format.

If you have questions about your display opportunities, get in touch with your Criteo contact. If you’d like to exclude any, you can send a list of layouts (not formats). A layout corresponds to one and only one banner of a given format. A format includes 100 layouts that you can access in the "Custom" tab.

If you don't like a specific layout, you can send the details of that layout to your Criteo contact by clicking on "Copy details".