Table of contents
Attribution 101
In retail media advertising, attribution is the process through which one identifies which sets of actions led to the sale of a product.
The Criteo Commerce Max measures sales attribution to determine what part of your retail media activity led to purchases by the shoppers that you reached.
We measure retail media attribution in our internal reports through Attributed Sales and ROAS (Return on Advertising Spend) metrics.
Our attribution methodology is made of three things:
User Matching: We only attribute purchases made by shoppers you've reached with your ad(s)
SKU Matching: We only attribute purchases of products that were related to your ad(s)
Look Back Window: We only attribute purchases made within a selected time after your ad was either clicked on or seen.
You can change your attribution at any time, and all data and dashboards in the platform will update retroactively to match your new settings in just a few hours.
User Matching Rules
Criteo's Commerce Max Platform will rely on four user identifiers to determine whether a purchase is related to your ad(s) or not:
The retailer’s CRM ID
The retailer’s 1st party cookie ID
The Criteo cookie ID
The Criteo X-device ID
All of our user matching rules are purely deterministic.
We never use IP addresses or probabilistic models to determine attribution at the user level.
Lookback Windows
As a result, in order to give you more flexibility, you can choose from the following options when setting up your campaign attribution model:
- Post-click: 7, 14, 30 days
- Post-view: None, 1, 7, 14, 30 days
In the beginning, we recommend that you set up an attribution window that you’re used to, in order to compare apples to apples. Then, as you turn on more campaigns, you can consider changing your model to see the impact of those changes.
Product Matching
Commerce Max considers products as attributable if:
Same Product
The exact same product as the one promoted in your ad is purchased by a shopper you’ve reached. We call this “same product" attribution.
Same Category
One of the products that is within the same category and brand as the promoted one is purchased by a shopper you’ve reached. We call this “same category" attribution.
Same category attribution is defined by a universal catalog created by Google. This catalog allows us to have standardized categories and be sure that one product is always sorted in the same category.
This allows us to have only one category per product even when the product is stored in two categories in a retailer. For instance, an organic baby food product can be found in the organic category and the baby food category.
Same Brand
Any product within the same brand as the promoted one is purchased by a shopper you've reached. We call this "same brand" attribution.
Sales Deduplication
A shopper’s journey can involve multiple advertising events (such as clicks and impressions) that lead to an eventual conversion to purchase. Sales deduplication means that a sales conversion is attributed once to a single advertising event (deduplication) rather than multiple events (duplication).
Commerce Max's attribution model ensures that this single attributed event is the most relevant event that led to the purchase. Any other events that led to the purchase are considered assisted sales (scroll down to Attribution Metrics to view Assisted Sales).
To determine which of an ad’s advertising events is the most attributable event, the CMax attribution model applies the following prioritization rules in descending order of priority:
Clicks take precedence over impressions.
Same SKU events take precedence over Same Category events.
If SKU events and user events yield the same characteristics, then the event that is the closest to the time of purchase takes precedence.