Guest Blog - Michael Steckler, Criteo's MD in Northern Europe, talks data feeds and retargeting consumers online

Michael Steckler, Criteo’s MD for Northern Europe explains why high-quality product data feeds are increasingly important in behavioural retargeting applications

Behavioural retargeting is a relatively new but increasingly important online product marketing application. Also known as ‘remarketing’, it allows publishers to find previous visitors across the internet and display relevant banners to drive them back (retarget) to their website to complete their transaction.

Criteo is a major player in the retargeting space and enables e-commerce sites to re-engage with potential customers who have left their website by tagging them with an anonymous cookie that enables us to track the product they have shown interest in. When they visit other pages on the internet, we can find these lost prospects and retarget them with unique personalised banner ads featuring product-level recommendations based on their browsing history. These are generated in real-time for each individual, with the level of personalisation and conversion rate directly influenced by the quality of the merchant’s product feed.

It is critical that the product feed the personalised banner ads are created from contain all the information a merchant wishes to show the consumer such as product images, price, promotions, description and offers. The regularity of the feed is equally as important in ensuring the information remains accurate and relevant (stock availability, pricing and the like). As such, we work directly with advertisers and third parties such as FusePump if they are already integrated with an advertiser to help make the process easier, as well as enabling increasing levels of feed sophistication.

In applications where product information is changing rapidly – such as in the classifieds sector or during sale periods, we can also set up APIs for retailers to help with the frequency of update. Indeed, with the increasingly intelligent use of data for one-to-one marketing, the quality of product feeds is growing in importance. We introduced ‘category bidding’ last year, which allows merchants to optimise and set a cost-per-click (CPC) threshold for each product category based on margin and profit goals. Categorisation is defined by the advertiser and managed within the product feed, translating into ad creative where different products displayed in the same ad can have different CPCs, depending on their product category.

Advertisers are well aware of the importance of refreshing text for individual keywords, as well as defining alternative bid strategies at a keyword level. Our technology delivers the same level of control and performance but uses images alongside product descriptions. The product feed is therefore a key component in ensuring a relevant service to consumers and allowing for greater click through and conversion to sale.