How Keyword Targeting Works for Sponsored Products

You do not have to research or choose keywords. Every product you add to a line item already has keywords associated with it by our automated keyword model, typically over 100 per line item.

The model is built on 12 years of Criteo machine learning and first-party data. It targets the terms most likely to drive conversions, return, and scale, including head terms, long-tail terms, and misspellings.

How Keywords Get Associated With Your Products

We look at organic traffic on the retailer's site to see which products shoppers click and view after searching a given term. That builds a connection between search terms, product taxonomies, and brands. When you add a product to a line item, we determine which terms are most relevant to it and to similar products, and use those for targeting.

The automated keyword model continuously identifies the most relevant keyword-product associations for your campaigns. Two recent improvements have made this matching smarter and more accurate:

Semantic Candidate Retrieval

The model now uses semantic understanding — not just historical click data — to build keyword-product associations. This means your products can be matched to relevant search terms even if they have never been clicked together before, including new products and long-tail or uncommon search terms that click-based approaches would previously miss.

Visual Attribute Understanding

The model reads product images to identify attributes like color, gender, and brand when catalog text and descriptions do not fully describe what a product looks like. A product listed without a color field, for example, can still be matched to a shopper searching "navy blue coat" because the model reads the image directly. If a product image is missing or low in quality, the model relies on text signals only.

Together, these improvements deliver more accurate ad matching and broader search coverage. No changes to your campaign setup are required.

Automatic and submitted keywords come from different sources and do different jobs:

When submitting your own keywords is worth the effort:

• You have identified high-performing terms the model has not included.

• Your products are niche or specialized, where automatic coverage may be thinner.

• You want coverage of misspellings or alternative forms.

• Your line item has a tightly scoped product theme.

When it is not: if you want broad coverage with minimal setup, the automated model already does that. Manual submission is fine-tuning, not a substitute.

Submitted keywords are added in Step 2 of the line item creation or editing workflow, in the Additional Keywords section below Keyword Targeting Strategy. You can also submit them from the Keywords page of a live line item.

To submit keywords during setup:

1. In Step 2, find the Submitted Keywords section.

2. Enter your keywords, one keyword or keyword string per row.

3. Click Next to save the step, then work through the workflow and click Launch.

Your keywords do not enter review until you launch. If you stop before the Review step, nothing is submitted.

The Rules That Decide Approval

• A keyword must be relevant to all products in the line item. Relevance is judged by searching the term on the retailer's site and comparing the organic results to your line item's products.

• Competitor brand names cannot be submitted. They are automatically prohibited and deactivated from your line item. To target competitor terms, use conquesting.

What Happens to Each Keyword You Submit

1. Already mapped by the automated model → automatically allowed.

2. Contains a competitor brand name → automatically prohibited.

3. Anything else → reviewed by a Criteo reviewer for relevance.

You are notified in the platform when your keywords have been reviewed. You can also have that notification emailed, from your Account Preferences.

Keyword Tips

• Keywords are not case-sensitive.

• Duplicate entries are de-duplicated automatically.

• Special characters are permitted, but may be parsed.

• Negative keywords take priority. A keyword in both your submitted and negative lists is treated as negated.

The Keywords page shows every keyword on a line item, automatic and submitted, with its status and its bid. It exists only at line item level. There is no campaign-wide keywords view.

To get there:

1. Click a campaign name to open the line item dashboard.

2. Click the line item's name, or click the ⋮ icon in the Actions column and select View Details.

3. You land on the line item's Products page.

4. In the top panel, click the Manual Keywords or Automatic Keywords tab.

The page has two tabs:

• Manual Keywords: every keyword you submitted, with its status and bid. Also includes any automatic keyword you have given a custom bid.

• Automated Keywords: the top 100 most relevant keywords associated with your line item by our model. You can view them and add keyword-level bids.

Every submitted keyword carries one of three statuses, and the status determines whether your bid on it does anything.

A keyword bid sets a specific cost per click for one search term, replacing the bid the line item would otherwise submit.

To set or edit one keyword bid:

1. Click the line item's name to reach the Products page.

2. Click the Manual Keywords tab in the top panel.

3. In the Keyword Bid column, click the pencil Edit icon next to your keyword.

4. Enter your bid in the pop-up.

To edit several at once: tick the checkboxes beside the keyword rows, click Edit Bid in the top right, and enter your bid.

Your keyword bid must be at or above the line item's minimum bid, which is shown below the entry field.

With bids possible at four levels, this is the order that decides what goes into the auction.

A keyword bid replaces the bid that would otherwise be submitted: the line item CPC as adjusted by the optimizer.

How it interacts with everything else:

• Max CPC always wins. If your line item has a Max CPC, it caps the keyword bid, however high the keyword bid is.

• Keyword bid beats product bid. Where both apply, the keyword bid takes precedence.

• A search page bid multiplier still applies on top. A 200% multiplier on the search page with a $1.00 keyword bid submits $3.00 to the auction.

• The retailer's minimum bid is still a floor.

The resolution order is: keyword bid, then product bid, then line item CPC. The page type multiplier applies to whichever bid won, and the result is clamped between the minimum bid and the Max CPC.

To learn more, please see Adjust Your Sponsored Products Bids for product bids and page type multipliers.

Stemming means one keyword covers its variations. A keyword bid is applied to the stemmed keyword, so the same bid is used for every variation of it.

A $1.00 bid on jean also applies to:

• jean · jeans · jean's · Jean · Jean's

It also covers variations in special characters, word order, and spacing:

Use this deliberately. You do not need to submit or bid on every variant of a term, because one keyword covers the set.

Match types. Match type availability differs between positive and negative keywords:

• Submitted (positive) keywords are exact match only. We do not offer phrase or broad match for positive keywords.

• Negative keywords can be broad or exact match. To learn more, please see Exclude Keywords With Negative Keyword Targeting.

Three reporting dimensions describe your keywords.

Both Search Term and Stemmed Search Term can contain keywords you submitted yourself. The difference is that Search Term shows raw shopper data, while Stemmed Search Term shows only stemmed forms.

Entered Vs. Searched

Search Term Type takes one of two values, and they sound alike but mean different things:

• Entered: the search term matches exactly what you submitted as a manual keyword.

• Searched: the search term does not match one of your submitted keywords exactly, but it does match a stemmed variation of one.

If you look only at Entered, you will undercount the traffic your submitted keywords generated, because stemming means most of it arrives as Searched.

There is no single "keyword report". Keyword data reaches you through the Share of Voice by Keyword report and through keyword dimensions and filters available across the reporting suite. To learn more, please see Available Reports and Insights and Insights Reports.