Monica Axinte
Criteo is well known as one of the leading digital marketing suites that is used by over 12,000 advertisers and has been proven to be successful in over 130 countries across the globe.
The number and the names certainly back up the claims that Criteo has made on its website. As of today, Criteo has a total of 1.4 billion unique monthly internet users. In addition to that, Criteo has helped its clients earn a grand total of $600 billion in post-click sales within a span of 12 months.
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Criteo solutions for merchants
Criteo product feed specification
How to optimize your feed for Criteo?
Criteo Analytics
Criteo Solutions for merchants
At this point in time, Criteo is offering its clients four distinct products, each of which are uniquely designed to boost sales and optimize marketing endeavours.
1) Criteo Dynamic Retargeting
This product from Criteo can be hugely benefit to ecommerce businesses that are looking to drive sales by intelligently converting visitors into shoppers by re-engaging them with the help of dynamic, personalized and perfectly placed ads.
- App Advertising - helps retailers bring shoppers back to their mobile app
- Facebook Dynamic Ads - delivers relevant and personalized ads across all Facebook proprieties.
2) Criteo Sponsored Products
This product from Criteo has the ability to put products in front of shoppers along their purchasing path. By understanding an individual’s behavior across all devices, browsers and applications brands and retailers alike can scale their business with the help of their product feeds.
3) Criteo Audience Match
Just like Google's Customer Match, it allows online retailers to upload and target audiences built from their customer email lists and create ads tailored to customer segments in Criteo.
4) Criteo Customer Acquisition
Just like the Audience Match service it puts the to good use the existing data in a merchant's CRM. This solution focuses on retargeting for up-sell existing customers.
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Criteo Product Feed Specification
The accuracy of your product data is essential to improving the ad relevancy for a customer search. Your data feed has to be optimized for Criteo to bring shoppers to your website, increase ROAS and make the most sales.
Since the data feed is essential, it is important to improve the accuracy of the data feed so that so that it matches the items that are being sold in your store.
In order to retrieve the product feed, Criteo requires merchants to use one of the following formats: TSV, CSV and XML.
Required Fields for Criteo
The following is a list of information that must be provided.
ID: This is a unique product identifier. The ID must start with a letter or number and can only contain ASCII characters. It should not exceed 250 characters and should be of the string variant.
Title: It is required for every single product in the feed and cannot be empty or blank. The character limitation is 120 although 25 is strongly recommended.
Description: Even though the limitation is 5000 characters, 50 characters is the ideal number of characters that should be used.
Google Product Category: This is the category of the product being submitted and should be in accordance to the Google Product taxonomy. Criteo wants the most relevant category in the case that a product can be related to several categories.
Link: This is required for every product in the feed and should be within 1024 characters. Must begin with the protocol (http or https) and should be followed by the URL of the page. If the protocol is missing from your product URL you can add it to your feed.
Image Link: Mandatory for every product in the feed It should be contained within 2000 characters.
Additional Image Link: It must begin with http:// followed by the full URL of the product’s image. All the symbols have to be encoded. The limit is 1024 characters.
Availability: Pre-order, shipping and in stock are the three possible values used to populate availability of a product. This should not exceed the 25 character limit.
Price: The price should always be in the same currency as the site. The character limitation is 14 and the decimal separator must be a period (.) with no thousands separator.
Sale Price: This is different from the previous field as it shows the price at which the product is available for sale on the website. It can vary with the availability of the product. The character limit is 14 as well.
GTIN: Global Trade Item Number or GTIN is a unique product identifier that can be used for a product, service or item in the global marketplace. If you don't have the GTINs in your product feed we got you covered here: How to find GTINs for your products.
Brand: This refers to the product’s brand name. It can only contain 70 ASCII characters.
Adult: The adult attribute is used when it is not appropriate for people younger than 18 years to view the product. The value must either be true or false.
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Optional Fields for Criteo feeds
It is not mandatory for businesses to provide Criteo with information on the following fields.
However, doing so will make it easier for Criteo to match the user query to the product. In addition to that, you will be reducing your advertising costs by providing optional fields that increase the probability of getting relevant clicks.
The more relevant clicks you have, the more revenue you are likely to earn from product sales. These fields may not be as important as the ones mentioned above, but their significance in enhancing the effectiveness of your online advertisements cannot be undermined under any circumstances.
- Basic Product Information
- Mobile Link
- Condition
- Item Group ID
- Color
- Gender
- Age group
- Material
- Pattern
- Size (type, system)
- Shipping (weight, height, width, length, label)
- Promotion ID
- Sale Price Effective Date
For the complete list of optional fields and all information needed on how to best prepare your feed for Criteo visit their product feed specification page.for Google there's notfor Google there's not
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Submitting Data to Criteo
Creating the data feed is the first step of launching the advertising campaign for your products. Next step is to upload it to Criteo and there are a few essential steps for having your product catalog up and running. We've covered the multiple ways in which you data can be submitted here: Upload your data feed to shopping engines.
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How to optimize your feed for Criteo?
If you are already using Google Shopping you'll be happy to hear that Criteo uses the same product feed as Google. If you have already optimized your feed for Google there's not much you can do other than transferring your feed into Criteo's system.
If you have just started building your feed you can start by making sure you follow the requirements and you optimize it:
Don't forget to optimize attributes such as your product titles, the images that show up in the listings, add the product types to the list of fields and use custom labels to organize your products.
Optimizing your feeds is not a one off activity, therefore you should aim for constant optimization. The Criteo Publisher Marketplace can be used to frequently monitor the campaign and market performance. This puts the business in a better position eliminate errors, optimize the advertising campaign and general additional revenue.
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Download our Guide to Feed Optimization eBook to learn more about how you can:
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Criteo Analytics
Criteo gives its clients the option to export and analyze data using third party applications.
If you are looking for a reliable analytics tool to understand the performance of your product ads on Criteo, you could always count on DataFeedWatch Analytics.
It shows you clicks, conversions and revenue for each individual product. This puts you in a better position to understand which products are unprofitable and when you should remove them.
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Conclusion
In conclusion, it is fair to say that a digital marketing suite like Criteo could very well be the all important cog in the engine that makes it possible for an ecommerce business to survive and thrive in this intensely competitive market.
Criteo opens up a world of opportunities for a business to make their digital marketing campaign vastly more effective and profitable.
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