Where would creatives from Sponsored Product campaigns show up?
Sponsored Products campaigns serve native ads on variety of pages on a retailer site and app such as the Home page, Search and Product Details page. Please check out What is Onsite Sponsored Products? for specific details.
What are some of the benefits of running a Sponsored Product campaign?
Sponsored Product campaigns help your product pages stand out, leading to greater visibility, therefore, driving incremental sales.
Advertised products can drive increased sales helping to accelerate your growth and meet demand more quickly.
Increase opportunity for your product to appear at the top of search results and maintain visibility and competitiveness in the marketplace.
Sponsored Products allow you to reach shoppers who are actively looking to buy, improving the likelihood of conversion.
These campaigns are highly effective at driving sales in proportion to your advertising spend, ensuring a strong ROAS.
You have full control over your bidding and reporting at the individual SKU level, allowing for more tailored and efficient campaigns.
Pay for performance! You only pay when a customer clicks on the ad, making it a cost-effective and performance-based advertising solution.
Launching Sponsored Products is quick and easy requiring a very short lead time and no creative needed.
What are the different buying paths for Sponsored Products?
Managed Serve (only available to 1P Advertisers)
Self-Serve
Will my Self-Serve campaign participate in the same auction as all other buying paths (Managed Serve, Self-Serve and via Criteo)?
Yes, all campaigns are considered equal. The winner of the auction is determined by a combination of the SKU’s:
Relevancy to the ad placement (ex: the algorithm would give a higher relevancy score to bottled water products on the term “water” than water shoes).
Bid (the highest bid is more likely to win the placement).
Input from our algorithm to show SKUs that are more likely to lead to a click (this relates back to relevancy also).
Why would I choose a Self-Serve over a Managed Serve Sponsored Products execution?
The Managed Service option is helpful for brands with limited resources or limited knowledge, but some brands have more sophisticated media buying teams and would like more control over campaign set-up and optimizations.
The platform for both Self-Serve and Managed Service Sponsored Products is the same. Whether you choose to manage your campaigns independently (Self-Serve) or have a dedicated account manager handle it for you (Managed Service), you will use the same interface and tools to create, monitor, and optimize your ads.
What happens if I don’t have enough SKUs to run?
The more SKUs you advertise, the larger coverage you will have across placements and the ability to make more SKU-level optimizations.
The recommended minimum number of SKUs is 10 to allow for the algorithm to prioritize the best performers, with a max of 1K. Ads will not render if a product is out of stock.
How many clicks can be billed per ad impression for Sponsored Products?
For Sponsored Products ads, which are billed on a cost-per-click (CPC) model, Criteo allows up to two billable clicks per ad impression. This policy has been in effect since October 3, 2022, and is designed to fairly capture genuine shopper engagement.
Shoppers may interact with a Sponsored Product ad more than once, for example, clicking to view the product, and later clicking again to take action (such as adding it to their cart). In these cases, both clicks reflect real intent and are eligible for billing.
To prevent overbilling, any third or subsequent clicks on the same ad impression are not counted, billed, or displayed in reporting.
This approach aligns with industry standards (including those followed by platforms like Google) and helps ensure fairness, transparency, and consistency across campaigns.
Before this, Criteo actively monitors for and filters out invalid traffic (IVT) - including non-human activity such as bots or crawlers to ensure that only high-quality, legitimate clicks are billed. This helps protect advertiser's budgets and reinforces trust in campaign performance.