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Your first month with Criteo

Criteo is designed to help advertisers of every size quickly get started to drive results for their businesses. The platform is intended to be easy to use regardless of your experience in digital marketing and your technical or design resources.
 
Even if you’re new to digital advertising, you can learn the basics of display advertising, how to connect your site, and how to launch a campaign. From here, Criteo ads can help fuel your business as it grows.


Choosing the right campaign 
The two most common goals for Criteo campaigns are: 

  • Traffic: You want to reach new audiences or encourage previous visitors to come back to your website and remember your products or services. This goal will encourage the most relevant and likely-to-be-interested people to visit your store.

  • Conversions: If you’d like to drive conversions, this goal is for you. The objective focuses on getting customers to complete the desired action (usually a purchase or a sign-up form). 


For conversions, your website traffic will impact the results you'll see. Your website traffic number might be too small to drive conversions with a retargeting campaign.  

Therefore, you'll need to work on increasing your volume of website visitors before setting up a conversion or sales-focused campaign. 

Optimizing your Criteo campaigns 
Setting up your campaign is a good first step, but it’s important to learn how to monitor your campaign’s performance over time.  

In your first month, you can expect to see your results change over time as Criteo learns about your business and your audiences. Here is how Criteo's technology starts optimizing in your first month: 

  • Gather data about your existing site visitors and their browsing and purchasing behaviors.

  • Learn which ads work the best across each channel.

  • Apply what we learn to find your best new customers.

  • Fine-tune your performance toward achieving your goal.

It might be tempting to make changes or pause your campaigns if you don’t see results after one day. Patience is key; Criteo’s technology needs time to learn from the data who is most interested in what you’re selling.

Try waiting until your campaign has run for two to four weeks before changing your budget or pausing the campaign. 

After a few weeks, Criteo should have enough data to optimize your campaign. 

Get the full view of your attribution 
As people interact with your ads, they may engage with multiple ads you have running across a variety of platforms and publishers. To understand the value of each of these ad interactions, you can use attribution models.  

Attribution models help you understand how your ads are performing and where you can optimize your campaigns. Each model has pros and cons — the challenge comes from connecting all the data from different marketing channels.  

If you are running a web traffic campaign with a smaller audience, we recommend looking at your CPM as well to benchmark your performance.  

You can look at “Post-Click + Post-View" to standardize your results to match what might be the default attribution model of your other advertising partners like Google or Facebook.  

With Criteo’s Analytics module, you can compare several different attribution models:  

  • 30-days click: A sale is attributed to your campaign when a client clicks your ad and purchases a product within the following 30 days.

  • 1-day view: A sale is attributed to your campaign when a client sees your ad and purchases a product within the following 24 hours.

  • 7-days click: A sale is attributed to your campaign when a client clicks your ad and purchases a product within the following 7 days.

  • 30-days click + 1-day view: A sale is attributed to your campaign when a client sees your ad and purchases a product within the following 24 hours or if they click your ad and purchase a product within the following 30 days.

  • 1-day click: A sale is attributed to your campaign when a client clicks your ad and purchases a product within the following 24 hours.

  • Client attribution: This reflects your custom attribution if you had decided to send us your sales data.

Learn more about the pros and cons of different attribution models on the Criteo blog here.  

Create a full-funnel strategy 
Both traffic and conversion campaigns are important on their own, but they work best as part of a full-funnel marketing strategy.  

When you run a full-funnel advertising campaign, you show relevant ads for every touchpoint in your customer’s decision-making journey. There are three stages in this buyer journey: awareness, consideration, and conversion. 

This means your advertising is tailored to knowing what customers want to buy, when they’re ready to buy, and how they want to buy. 

To focus on the awareness and consideration phases, you can start by targeting an audience new to your brand, such as Criteo Similar Audiences. This behavior-based audience finds the customers who look and act like your current site visitors and existing customers.  

In another campaign, you can focus on retargeting those who visit your website. Personalized ads will encourage them back to your site by showing the products or offers most relevant to them.  

As you build your marketing funnel, you can become more granular with how you use campaigns to target different points in the funnel. You might run a campaign focused on building customer loyalty or engaging customers who last purchased within a specific timeframe.