Criteo

What Stevin gets out of Criteo

Criteo does one thing well and has done for a long time: dynamic retargeting with product ads that adapt to what someone viewed. For e-commerce with a product feed it usually delivers tidy results. The honest story is that a large part of those results is retargeting, and retargeting easily claims conversions that would have happened anyway. We see webshops stall on this: Criteo's reporting looks strong, but the feed is out of date so the wrong products get shown, and no one can say how much of that revenue was genuinely extra. The platform optimizes within its own screen, not on your broader funnel. Stevin runs as a layer on top, reads the campaign and feed data through the API and flags where the feed is off or where the retargeting figures are mostly claiming existing conversions. The person judges, Stevin keeps the channel honest against the rest of the mix.

What you pair it with

Choosing Criteo requires a clean, current product feed, because without that it shows the wrong products and the return drops without you noticing right away. Count on a connection between your webshop, your feed and your analytics. The pixel and the feed handle the data flow, so the numbers do come out. The hard question is how much of that claimed revenue was genuinely extra and would not have happened anyway. Without something that lays the channel next to your other sources, you may be paying for conversions you would have had regardless.

Common mistakes

• →Running on an out-of-date feed, then Criteo shows the wrong products and the return drops.
• →Believing the platform's reporting without checking how much revenue was genuinely extra.
• →Judging retargeting apart from the funnel, so blind to double-counting with other channels.
• →Assuming a strong dashboard is the same as a strong contribution.