Onsite Sponsored Products FAQs

Across the retailer's highest-traffic pages. There are 10 page types: Homepage, Search, Merchandising, Category, Product Detail, Checkout, Confirmation, Deals, Search Bar, and AI Assistant.

Which of these are available depends on the retailer's inventory. Not every retailer offers every page type.

Once your line item is live, you can bid differently by page type using bid multipliers. To learn more, please see Getting Started With Onsite Sponsored Products for what each page type is, and Adjust Your Sponsored Products Bids for the multipliers.

A page type is the shopper's context, meaning the kind of retailer page your ad can appear on, such as Search or Product Detail.

A placement is a single ad slot on that page. The retailer configures each one, and each has its own position. One page can hold several placements, so two placements can share the same page type and still be separate opportunities.

You bid by page type, and your products compete for individual placements.

To learn more, please see Getting Started With Onsite Sponsored Products.

Sponsored Products offers the following benefits:

• Your products stand out, driving visibility and incremental sales.

• You reach shoppers who are actively looking to buy, so conversion likelihood is higher.

• You control bidding and reporting at the individual product level.

• You pay only for clicks, with no impression cost.

• There is no creative to produce, so lead times are short.

To learn more, please see Getting Started With Onsite Sponsored Products.

Yes. Every campaign competes on equal terms, whichever buying path created it.

The winner of each auction is decided by three things together:

• Relevance to the placement. Bottled water products score higher on the term "water" than water shoes do.

• The bid. A higher bid is more likely to win.

• Predicted click likelihood, from our algorithm, which relates back to relevance.

The highest bid therefore does not always win. To learn more, please see Getting Started With Onsite Sponsored Products.

We recommend a minimum of 10 products per line item, so the algorithm has enough to work with to prioritise the best performers. The maximum is 1,000 per line item.

More products means broader coverage across placements and more scope for product-level optimization.

Once your insertion order is signed, our team creates your users from the email addresses you provide, grants access, and adds your balance.

You cannot run ads until a balance exists and is mapped to your campaign. To learn more, please see Getting Started With Onsite Sponsored Products.

You can add budget up to the investment level of your signed insertion order.

To go above that, your Criteo representative needs a new insertion order signed before they can load further funds.

Changing a budget within your existing funds takes effect immediately. To learn more, please see Edit or Duplicate a Sponsored Products Line Item.

Yes. Choose any future start date, or start immediately.

A campaign or line item with a future start date shows as Scheduled and switches to Active automatically on the day of launch.

The minimum bid is the lowest cost per click accepted for a product's category. You cannot bid below it.

The retailer sets it. They define the category minimum and we display it in the platform. That is why it differs between retailers, and between categories on the same retailer.

A practical starting point is roughly 20% above the minimum, which keeps you competitive and gives the optimizer room to work.

You can find the minimum bid in two places:

• During line item setup, when you select your optimizer.

• Once the line item is live, in the product-level details.

To learn more, please see Choose a Bidding Strategy for Sponsored Products.

We recommend starting with the automated keywords and refining from there.

Automated keyword targeting is always active and cannot be switched off. It gives you broad coverage from launch. Once data comes in, add negative keywords for terms that are not working, and submit your own for gaps you have identified.

To learn more, please see How Keyword Targeting Works in Sponsored Products.

Exclude terms that are pulling your average performance down, or that are not relevant to your business.

Negative keywords are one of the more effective optimizations available, because they remove wasted spend rather than redistributing it.

To learn more, please see Exclude Keywords With Negative Keyword Targeting.

You have two levers:

• Keywords. Negate terms that are underperforming or irrelevant, and submit terms you want to target.

• Page type bid multipliers. Bid up or down by the kind of page your ad appears on, once the line item is live.

To learn more, please see Exclude Keywords With Negative Keyword Targeting and Adjust Your Sponsored Products Bids.

Do not change anything during the learning phase: 21 days on the Conversions or Revenue Optimizer, a few days on the Clicks Optimizer. The model needs that time to learn and adapt.

After that: small, incremental changes, monitoring performance between them. Change one thing at a time, so you can tell which change moved the result.

To learn more, please see Optimize a Live Sponsored Products Campaign.

Most improvement comes from two changes:

• Adjusting cost per click at product level. Bid up your strong performers, bid down the weak ones.

• Turning keywords on and off. Negate the terms dragging your averages down.

To learn more, please see Optimize a Live Sponsored Products Campaign and Adjust Your Sponsored Products Bids.

The number of product slots you won at auction, divided by the number of your products that entered the auction.

It tells you how competitive your bids are: a low Win Rate means your bids are not winning the slots you are entering.

You can find Win Rate in two places. Add Win Rate as a column on the Line Items dashboard, where it sits under Performance in Modify Columns. Or for reporting, go to Analytics → Account Activity → Onsite Sponsored Products Activity and select Win Rate from the metrics dropdown.

To learn more, please see Optimize a Live Sponsored Products Campaign for how to act o

There are two reasons, and neither is an error.

• The Avg CPC column includes your account fees, not only click costs. It will not match the CPC you entered.

• The Revenue and Conversions optimizers vary your bid around the figure you set, to maximise performance.

To learn more, please see Optimize a Live Sponsored Products Campaign.

No. Attribution changes what is measured, not what is delivered. It does not affect bidding or ad serving, and you can change it at any time.

However, it does restate your reporting. Changes apply retroactively across the campaign, within a couple of hours, so historical figures move too.

To learn more, please see About Attribution.

Sponsored Products works best as a continuous programme rather than in bursts:

• The algorithm keeps learning. Stopping and restarting discards that progress.

• Starting and stopping costs you the ramp-up each time.

• It is a low-funnel tactic that works where purchase intent already exists, which is always.

• Brand exposure from impressions costs nothing, since you pay only for clicks.