Create an Onsite Sponsored Products Campaign
A campaign is the container for your Sponsored Products activity. It holds your budget, your attribution settings, and one or more line items.
What each level controls:
The campaign level holds the campaign name, budget, flight dates, attribution model, and which balance funds it.
Each line item within it sets the retailer, the SKUs to advertise, keywords, bids, and your optimization model.
The campaign therefore controls your spending and how performance is measured. The line item controls which products run on which retailer site.
Before you start, you need a balance. A balance holds the funds your campaigns spend. Ask your Criteo representative to add the funds from your signed insertion orders to create a balance. You can then map a balance to your campaign during creation, or later in Campaign Settings. The field is not mandatory at creation, but a campaign with no balance will not spend.
See the walkthrough below for a visual guide to setting up your first Onsite Sponsored Products campaign (full written instructions below):
Start a New Campaign and Choose Campaign Type
Go to the Campaigns section.
Click +Campaign.
Choose your budget type: Criteo Budget or Retailer Budget (for more information on Retailer Budget campaigns, see About Retailer Budget Campaigns).
Select Onsite.
For Campaign Type, select Onsite Sponsored Products.
For Buy Type, select Auction.
Name Your Campaign
Your campaign name is visible only to you. It appears in the Campaigns and Analytics sections. It never appears in your ads, and shoppers never see it.
We recommend a name you will still recognise in a report six months from now. If you run several brands or categories, include that in the name, because it will help you filter and group campaigns in reports.
Map Your Campaign to a Balance
A balance is what funds your campaign. Select an available balance from the Balance table, and use the search bar if needed.
A campaign can be mapped to more than one balance, and one balance can fund several campaigns.
If no balance is available to select, your signed insertion order funds have not been added yet. Contact your Criteo representative.
Set Your Campaign Flight Dates
Choose a start date and, optionally, an end date.
Campaign dates and line item dates are separate, and the relationship between them matters:
An end date is optional at campaign level. Without one, the campaign runs as long as it has funds.
The campaign end date takes priority over the line item end date. A line item scheduled to run beyond its campaign's end date will stop delivering when the campaign ends.
Set Your Campaign Budget
A campaign budget is optional. Choose one of the following:
Uncapped. The campaign spends from the funds available in the balance you mapped and delivery continues until the balance runs out.
Capped. Enter an amount. The campaign stops running once the line items inside it (combined) have spent that total budget.
If you cap it, you can also cap the rate of spend:
Cap | Options | What it does |
|---|---|---|
Monthly Budget | Fixed number or None. | The campaign spends until all its line items have reached this amount within the calendar month |
Daily Budget | Automated (Recommended), Fixed number, or None. | The campaign spends until all its line items have reached this amount in one day |
Automated readjusts your daily budget at the beginning of each day based on the number of days left of the campaign, then redistributes any underspend evenly across the days remaining. To enable it you need a campaign start date, a campaign end date, and a total campaign budget.
To learn more, please see Understand Budget, Caps, and Pacing for how the two levels interact and how automated pacing recalculates.
Choose Your Attribution Settings
Attribution decides which sales are credited to your ads, and therefore what your reported performance looks like. It is set at campaign level and applies to every line item inside it.
The defaults, which we recommend keeping for your first campaign:
Post-click: 30 days, same product and same category.
Post-view: 1 day, same product.
Each setting has two parts:
Lookback window | Product match | |
|---|---|---|
Post-Click |
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Post-View |
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The lookback window is how long after seeing or clicking your ad a purchase still counts.
The product match is how closely the purchased product must relate to the advertised one.
How to Choose
We recommend starting with the window your own reporting already uses, so you are comparing like with like. Once you have a baseline across a few campaigns, you can change the model and compare the results. The right window differs by category: a shopper buying groceries usually decides in minutes, while a shopper buying a television can take weeks.
To learn more, please see Understand Sponsored Products Attribution Settings for what each combination measures.
Finish Campaign Setup and Add Your Line Items
Click Next.
Your campaign is created, and you are taken directly into line item creation. A campaign with no line items does not deliver. The line item is where you choose a retailer, products, keywords, and your bid.
You have three options:
Multi-retailer setup, across several retailers from one product list.
Single retailer setup.
I'll set them up later, which creates the campaign shell only.
To learn more, see Create a Sponsored Products Line Item for the full workflow.
How to Organize Your Campaigns
How you split activity between campaigns and line items determines what you can report on and optimize separately. Three common situations:
One brand, one category
Create one campaign, with one or more line items.
Add as many line items as your strategy needs, grouped by products, budget cap, pacing, or however you manage spend.
Each line item can hold many products, but line items in the same campaign should not share products.
Bundling line items under one campaign gives the engine more volume to learn from, and gives you cross-line-item optimization.
One brand, several categories
Create one campaign, with line items broken out by category.
Each line item holds the products for one category, so you can set budget, pacing, and optimization per category.
Do not put the same product in more than one line item.
You can see category-level reporting under Analytics → Campaign Summary and the Activity Dashboard.
Several brands, one or more categories
Create one campaign per brand.
Keep each campaign's line items to that campaign's brand.
Add as many line items per campaign as your strategy needs, grouped by products, budget caps, or pacing.
You can see brand-level reporting under Analytics → Campaign Summary and the Activity Dashboard.