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Criteo have certainly become popular over the past few years with marketers. This is mainly due to them being sold into a no hassle site remarketing solution paying on a low risk CPC basis.

What a lot of marketers and CEOs don’t know is that by using a managed site retargeting service like Criteo is not only lazy and inefficient, but it it’s also opening the business to data leakage which could have a damaging effect.

Let’s break those three key points down further:

1. Inefficient way of spending money – Criteo typically charge c 50p CPC yet using a DSP eg. MediaMath and Adacado together, the eCPC rate would be c 5p. Everything works back to an eCPM for display so on a CTR of 1.5% you’re paying £5 CPM for the managed service via Criteo and only c 70p CPM for the media and dynamic creative service both on a self-service basis. Not only that, 1.5% is quite conservative for a dynamic remarketing CTR so as it goes up, so does Criteo’s eCPM.

2. Lazy – it’s a lot easier to send a monthly invoice to accounts to pay but it does take a bit more intelligence, will power and proactiveness to get a self-service DSP on board and dynamic creative supplier. Display CRM would only be part of someone’s job and they’d typically apply a tight frequency cap and low CPM at the top of the funnel, but as you go lower in the funnel the frequency cap should be increased alongside the CPM as the users become more valuable to your business.

3. Data leakage – allowing a third party to ‘manage’ your data for you is always risky that it could fall in the wrong hands eg. a competitor or data exchange

Something I haven’t mentioned is scale and volume, although Criteo do have a few exclusive publishers, this doesn’t match to any degree the sheer scale which a DSP such as MediaMath or DoubleClick Bid Manager bring to the table.