Your catalog and events quality score

Catalog and event quality is defined as the number of Product IDs fed into the Criteo OneTag that match with Product IDs from your product catalog. It is a key factor for the performance of campaigns as it directly relates to our engine recommendation. This calculation is reliant on having the Criteo OneTag implemented correctly on all your product pages.

Example: If there are 10,000 Criteo OneTag viewItem event hits (Product tag), and 9,500 Product IDs in those viewIteam events hit to match a Product ID in the feed, then the quality is 95%.

The importance of product catalog and event quality

A good product catalog and event quality are important for your Criteo campaign(s) performance. Low quality means that we are not able to match a significant proportion of the user actions on your website with your products in the Criteo Product Catalog. This means that we would not be able to enable product recommendation to the full scale.

Low Product Catalog and event quality score

Usually, a low score is caused by Product IDs being passed by Criteo OneTag events that do not match any Product ID from your product catalog.

If you are missing products displayable on your website in the product catalog, the quality will be low. Check that all displayable products on your website are provided in the product catalog.

For example, if the ID of this product http://exmplcom/sw7 is B789465 in the catalog, then the ID passed into the Criteo OneTag viewItem event must also be B789465.

If the Product ID is in your product catalog, we may not be able to display the product because:

Mandatory information is missing for this product in your Criteo catalog. (ID, Name, Image, URL are mandatory fields).
The product in your Criteo catalog is in a non-recommendable state.

Check that your events are passing the Ids correctly

Accurate Extension

To check the product ID in the event, you can use Accurate. It is a Criteo Utility used to read any tracker easily, specially made for Advertisers. Simply visit a few pages where the Criteo event that you are checking is fired, and match the value of the event’s product ID with the product ID value of your product catalog. 
To install this extension, go to the Events Tracking module and click on the eye icon on the event that you want to debug. There, you'll find the instructions to install the plugin. Copy the API key that appears there and click the "Download now" button in the Criteo tool section. You can also download it here, but not that you still need to follow the steps mentioned above steps to get the API key.

This extension is only compatible with Google Chrome. Once you install the extension, paste the API key to finish setting up the extension.

Web Developer Tools

Another method to check your product IDs is using the web developer tool. To open this up, follow these steps:

Right-click on your mouse anywhere on the page.
Select ‘Inspect’ on the page you want to look for the event on..
Navigate to the ‘Network tab’ and filter by ‘event?’.

Look for an event with status 200 and click on it. This will open the payload where you can view the product ID in the product event which should be available beside ‘p1:’. Please refer to the screenshot.

Checking your score

If you have recently updated your website, you should check for possible impacts on your events and on your Criteo Product Catalog. Make sure your products are consistent between your Product Catalog and your website.

To check the quality score, follow these steps:

Open the commerce Growth platform. From the left panel, select Events tracking.

Here you can see if there are any issues with your catalog and the event quality score. 

To check the score for a specific event type, click the "eye" icon on the right side of the event type that you want to check. The Event's details window opens.

3. Scroll down to see the ‘Potential gain’ section.

Here you can see % of a gain you can get on your match score. In the below screenshot, the match score for products on the 4th of May is 52.59% where as the potential gain is 47.41%.

In the dashboard below the potential gain, you can see the match score. Ideally, it should always be above 80%. The match rate curve will show you the historical score data for the period that you selected. The quality score chart has 3 view modes: Last hours, Last month, Last year. The main difference is that Last hours will display data aggregated by hour (each point in the chart represents one hour) while the other 2 will aggregate data by day (each point in the chart represents one day).

To identify Product IDs that are lowering your quality score, click on the non-displayable products button under the graph.

Here, you can differentiate between Product IDs sent on the events that are not in your product catalog from those that are excluded or that are out of stock. There are four possible scenarios that might be causing the non-matching product IDs in the CQ report. To check these, you will need to download the CSV report by clicking on the non-displayable report below the graph.

Here's more about these four possible scenarios.

The product is deleted from the catalog:

This means that the product was in the catalog, but was recently deleted in one of the imports. As products can remain in the database for a period of time after deletion, we were able to match this ID. However, it cannot be used in our banners. These IDs have the 'Is in the feed ?' No stat in the report.

The product is not included in the catalog:

In this case, the product was never part of the feed, or was deleted from the database a long time ago, therefore we couldn’t find any match in our system. These products have the 'Is in the feed ?': Unable to retrieve information, please try to download the report later stat in the report.

The product is blacklisted / blocked by AdSafety:

The third case is that the product is set as blacklisted either by the client or by a rule Criteo implemented on our side, therefore it cannot be shown in the banners. These products have the 'Is in the feed ?': Yes, Is Blacklisted ?: Yes stat in the report.

The product is not in stock:

The fourth case is that the product is marked as not in stock by the client, therefore it cannot be shown in the banners. These products have the 'Is in the feed ?': Yes, Is Blacklisted ?: No, Is Instock ?: No stat in the report.