Criteo: everything you need to know
Best for: retailers and brands with an existing customer base to retarget, using a product catalogue to turn past site visitors back into buyers through dynamic banners, and multi-store retailers using Criteo Local Ads to drive nearby shoppers back into physical stores.
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| Discovery | Purchase |
Criteo started as a retargeting specialist and has spent the last few years rebuilding itself into a commerce media platform: performance media for customer acquisition and retention, retail media for onsite placements on retailer sites, and Criteo Local Ads for driving nearby shoppers back into physical stores. It works with 200+ retailers and 1,300+ premium publishers on the supply side, and more than 4,000 brands on the demand side.
The core mechanic hasn't changed: Criteo builds personalised banners from your product catalogue and shows them to people who've already visited your site or app, using its own past-behaviour data to decide which products to show and to whom. That means the feed is doing the creative work, not a designer, so product data quality, current price, stock, imagery, directly determines whether the banner a past visitor sees is actually the product they were looking at.
Lengow keeps your catalogue synced and sends it directly to Criteo, and if your feed is already built for Google Shopping, most of the structure carries over. For Criteo Local Ads specifically, you also send Criteo your store sales data or customer data with a Store ID attached, so Criteo can match products to the specific store a shopper is most likely to visit. As with most advertising channels, Lengow doesn't pull channel-level performance reports back automatically (Google is the exception), so campaign tracking happens in Criteo's own dashboard.
Key figures
Sources: Criteo Q1 2026 results (6 May 2026); Criteo's own retailer/brand/publisher figures (criteo.com, 2026).
Channel positioning
Who will see your ads?
Almost by definition, Criteo's core format shows your ads to people who already know you: past site visitors, app users, and shoppers who added something to a basket and left. It's not a discovery channel first, it's a channel for winning back demand you already generated somewhere else.
Because the banners are built automatically from your feed, the products a shopper sees again are whatever your catalogue says is available and in stock at that moment. A product marked in stock that's actually sold out, or priced wrong, doesn't just look bad, it actively damages the retargeting relationship with someone who was already close to buying.
The honest limit: a site with low existing traffic gives Criteo little to retarget, and a business with no physical stores gets nothing from Local Ads specifically. This channel amplifies demand you're already generating elsewhere; it doesn't create it from nothing.
Sites with meaningful existing traffic
The more visitors OneTag can observe, the more precisely Criteo can retarget them.
Multi-store retailers
Local Ads is built specifically for retailers with physical locations they want to drive footfall into.
Wide, browsable catalogues
Fashion, home, electronics and similar categories where shoppers browse widely before buying benefit most from dynamic retargeting.
SMBs wanting less overhead
Criteo GO's self-service model suits smaller advertisers who don't want a managed-service relationship, currently live in the US and UK.
Who runs Criteo?
Criteo campaigns typically sit with performance marketing, with a feed team feeding it and, for Local Ads specifically, someone who owns store-level data.
Performance marketing managers
Own the retargeting budget and OneTag setup, and need the feed to reflect real-time stock and pricing so the retargeting relationship doesn't break trust.
E-commerce feed managers
Maintain the core attributes, product ID, name, URL, plus optional data, that determine how complete and convincing a dynamic banner looks.
Retail / omnichannel operations
Own store-level data (Store ID, per-store price and stock) for Local Ads, and coordinate with the feed team so online and in-store data stay consistent.
What you need to know before launching
Check the following against your own catalogue and store setup before configuring the channel.
Advertiser profile
Retailers and brands with meaningful existing site traffic to retarget. Local Ads additionally requires physical stores.
Cost model & budget
Auction-based CPC. Criteo GO offers a lighter, self-service entry point for smaller budgets, currently live in the US and UK.
Countries
Criteo operates in 100+ markets globally through its managed-service platform; self-service Criteo GO is more limited for now.
Technical setup
Add the Criteo OneTag to your website to collect on-site behaviour. Lengow sends your catalogue directly to Criteo once configured.
Feed requirements
Standard Dynamic Ads need product ID, name and URL as a minimum. Local Ads needs item_id, store_id, price and quantity, with availability and sale_price recommended; a separate feed per store is required.
Measurement
Track results directly in Criteo's dashboard. Lengow doesn't pull channel-level performance reports back automatically.
Criteo Local Ads, in more detail
Local Ads is its own feed type in Lengow, distinct from standard Criteo Dynamic Ads, built to encourage existing customers who live near one of your stores to visit it. The mechanics are simple: send Criteo your store sales data or customer data with a Store ID attached, import your product catalogue into Lengow in whatever format you already have it, Lengow sends that catalogue directly to Criteo, and Criteo activates a campaign combining the two. If you operate multiple stores, each one needs its own feed in Lengow, since a Shop ID is required per feed.
Bricomarché used this exact structure to develop Local Ads across Google, Facebook and Criteo for around 480 stores and 33,000 products managed through Lengow. Measured across the whole programme rather than Criteo in isolation, the retailer saw traffic multiply 3.3 times and online turnover multiply 12 times over a year, figures that reflect the full multi-channel effort, not Criteo Local Ads on its own.
"Local Ads let us bring our nationwide store network into a single, coherent digital acquisition strategy."
Hubert Brillaud, Head of Acquisitions, Bricomarché — read the Bricomarché case study
How to advertise on Criteo with Lengow
Setup follows Lengow's standard advertising channel process: add the Criteo channel catalogue, complete the required attributes, exclude any products you don't want retargeted, add the Criteo OneTag to your site, then launch. For Local Ads, you configure a separate feed per store, complete with Store ID, and coordinate with Criteo directly on activating the campaign against your store sales or customer data.
If your catalogue is already structured for Google Shopping, most of that structure carries over directly to Criteo. Lengow's Advertising channel generic guide and the Criteo Local Ads help article cover the configuration steps in detail.
| Channel challenge | What successful advertisers do | What Lengow automates |
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| Keeping out-of-stock products out of retargeting banners | Set up exclusion rules rather than manually filtering exports | Lengow exclusions apply automatically at every feed generation |
| Keeping listed price competitive against other retailers carrying the same product | Track competitor pricing and reprice before margin erodes | NetRivals monitors competitor prices and feeds pricing decisions back into the catalogue |
| Managing separate feeds per store for Local Ads | Set up one feed structure per store with a consistent Store ID rather than manually splitting exports | Lengow manages multiple store-level feeds from a single catalogue source |
| Migrating a feed already built for Google Shopping | Reuse existing category and attribute mapping rather than rebuilding from scratch | Lengow's mapping structures carry across channels, minimising duplicate setup work |
| Enriching banners beyond the three mandatory attributes | Complete optional attributes to present more complete product information | Lengow structures the full attribute set, not just the mandatory minimum, into the feed |
| Store-level availability data going stale between store data updates | Exclude unavailable items from the feed rather than marking every possible state manually | Lengow can be configured to exclude out-of-stock items automatically per Criteo's Local Ads best practice |
| No native performance report pulled back into Lengow | Track results directly in Criteo's own campaign dashboard | Lengow still reports on feed health, product counts and rejection reasons even where the channel doesn't return performance data |
Lengow's AI Studio can help keep product titles, descriptions and images consistent across every channel your feed reaches, including the dynamic banners Criteo generates automatically from your catalogue.
Eden Park: Criteo as the first channel connected
French rugby and lifestyle brand Eden Park connected Criteo as the very first channel in its Lengow setup, then built out from there. Measured across the full set of Lengow-managed campaigns rather than Criteo alone, the results give a sense of what a well-structured multi-channel feed strategy can do once the retargeting foundation is in place.
Criteo was the channel we started with, and it's still the one that anchors the rest of our acquisition strategy today.
×15 ROI
Across Lengow-managed campaigns as a whole, not Criteo in isolation.
60% of traffic and sales
Now driven through Lengow-connected channels, built up starting from Criteo.
Under 2 hours
To configure each additional channel once the Criteo foundation was in place.
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