The Art Of Personalised Retargeting

According to Criteo, a user can visit a site up to 5 times before making a final purchase decision. This is certainly true of me; spending hours or even days trying to find the best deal possible before I get my purse out.

This is exactly where Criteo steps in, helping both advertisers and retailers. With so many PPC ads changing daily or adjusting positions, it can be a tedious job remembering or trying to find that one ad that you were happy with and wanted to visit again.

How Does Criteo Work?

Criteo allows brands to continue communication with their users after they have left their site. They provide users with personalized adverts that remind them exactly what they have previously searched for and a simple banner to click on that can take the user directly to the product.

Criteo places large banners across many publisher sites such as hotmail, msn, yahoo and newspaper sites, encouraging the user to go ahead and make their purchase. The ads can offer special promotional prices for users that dropped out during the checkout process, show the exact products that a user searched for or similar or complimentary products that the user may also be interested in.

The banners are only shown to people who have visited your site within the past 30 days; making you message highly targeted, relevant and appealing to a user who should already be familiar with your brand.

Why is Criteo a must for any marketing strategy?

Many marketers do not consider lost prospects; where they may be going instead or why they do not return to their website. Retargeting users once they have left your website should really be a key part of any campaigns conversion strategy. Criteo can play a major part in increasing the number of return visitors to a website and increasing you ROI by focusing on the potential of these customers that could otherwise make their purchase decision elsewhere.

Criteo lets you take control; allowing you to adjust your budgets and bids according to your strategy, success and results. Criteo also takes users away from the traditional CPM models, low conversion rates and high set up costs that other contextual banner providers use. What Criteo brings to the market is a pure CPC model where retailers pay per click; therefore you only pay when a customer is ready to carry on making their purchase decision and each click is an investment a potential customer.

Through serving the right banner to the right person at the right time, Criteo maximises the chances that the viewer will click on the ad and finish their buying cycle there. Through displaying complimentary or similar products to a user, it can also increase the likelihood of a larger basket size.

Not only does Criteo allow advertisers to reengage with previous visitors, it also provides an element of free brand exposure. It enables a brand to gain exposure through a simple CPC model, increasing the chance of word of mouth advertising and potentially brand exposure through shared computers.

Criteo banners are completely customisable and easy to install; a process that can often be lengthy and of a high cost. Not in this case; Criteo cover the entire cost of the design, planning and set up costs.

A Users Point Of View

On Monday evening, I was looking online for bathroom lights and just as I found one that I liked my laptop ran out of battery. After sitting trying to remember what website I was on when I saw the product I wanted to purchase, I remembered Criteo and realised that Criteo could provide me with the answer along the side of my email account!

I personally think that Criteo is a fantastic idea and probably one of the most innovative forms of dynamic personalised advertising. With many brands such as Asos, Office, La Redoute, Lakeland and L’Occitane already making the most of this new form of remarketing, I hope that more and more retailers join Criteo and eventually diminish the number of annoying and irrelevant ads that many online publishers have splattered all over their websites.