Sponsored Products Campaign Launch Checklist

Confirm the basics of the campaign shell:

• Campaign name. This is internal only — it appears in the Campaigns and Analytics sections and never in your ads.

• Retailers. Each line item runs on one retailer. Confirm you have a line item for every retailer you intend to advertise with.

• Flight dates. Campaign dates and line item dates are separate.

See Create a Sponsored Products Campaign to change any of these settings.

Here, there are two separate things to confirm:

Your Balance

Ask your Criteo representative to add the balance from your signed insertion orders. Once added, you can map a balance to your campaign — during campaign creation, or later in Campaign Settings. Without a mapped balance your campaign has no funds to spend. You can check that your IO balance is associated to the correct campaign by checking Billing > Balances within your account.

Your Budgets, At Both Levels

Set a budget at campaign level and at line item level.

Check They Work Together

If your line item budgets add up to less than your campaign budget, your campaign will only ever spend up to the line item total.

Pacing

Set your Daily Budget to Automated (Recommended) rather than Fixed unless you have a reason not to. Automated spreads the remaining budget across the remaining days of the flight and recalculates each day. Left at None, your line item spends as fast as it can win auctions.

See Understand Budget, Caps, and Pacing for how the two levels interact and how automated pacing calculates.

By default, your campaign uses:

• 30-day post-click attribution, for same-product and same-category sales.

• 1-day post-view attribution, for same-product sales.

We recommend keeping these default settings for your first campaign. They are the settings most advertisers use, which makes your results comparable to a benchmark and to your own later campaigns. Change them once you have a baseline and a specific reason to do so.

To learn more, please see Understand Sponsored Products Attribution Settings.

Products

We recommend adding a wide range of products (ideally a minimum of 10) rather than a narrow selection. The optimization models need volume to learn from, and product performance is difficult to predict in advance. Remove low performers later, once you have data.

If a product is missing from the platform:

1. Confirm that the product is available on the retailer's side and not out of stock. A product the retailer does not carry will not appear in Commerce Max.

2. If the product is available on the retailer's site and still missing, contact your Criteo representative.

Keywords

Confirm your line item's strategy before you launch. The options are:

• Generic, Branded, and Conquesting

• Generic and Branded

• Conquesting

To learn more, please see How Keyword Targeting Works in Sponsored Products and Reach Competitor Shoppers With Search Conquesting.

Bid

Sponsored Products are bought through a first-price cost-per-click (CPC) auction. If you have no performance history to work from, you have two starting points:

• Bid approximately 20% above the retailer's minimum bid, or

• Use the suggested bid range shown during line item setup, which is based on recent winning bids for comparable products.

We recommend keeping a margin above the retailer's minimum bid. The algorithm varies your CPC around the figure you set, so a bid set at the minimum leaves no downward margin and prevents your campaign from optimizing.

We recommend adjusting bids gradually, by no more than 10 to 15% at a time.

Optimization Model

Confirm you've selected the optimization model that best suits your needs. Three models are available, each matched to a different objective:

To learn more, please see Choose a Bidding Strategy for Sponsored Products and Choose an Optimization Model for Sponsored Products.