Criteo Commerce Max (Retail Media) vs. Google Ads

Well suited--customizable enough to go to market efficiently and quickly. Not well suited--Plug-in multiple demand sources, improved targeting integrations with first-party data.

Google Ads is a useful advertising tool to build brand exposure and generate lead volumes for your chosen product. Whilst it can be costly at times due to competitor bidding strategies and requires constant monitoring to ensure campaigns perform as expected, it typically provides the desired quality and quantity of leads for custom budgets.

Incentivized

• Intuitive dashboards and reporting
• Custom templates for display media
• Flexibility in terms of setting guardrails for targeting

• Automated targeting via Smart Shopping campaign. It's one of the best campaign types in Google Ads. In the beginning, you may see lower revenue and ROAS, but once you give some meaningful time to your campaign, it is most likely to perform well.
• Smart bidding strategies: Google Ads has developed some really great bidding strategies such as maximizing conversion and maximizing conversion with ROAS settings. Based on one's requirement and their goal with revenue and target ROAS, they can choose the appropriate bidding strategy.
• Reporting: A business owner and advertising must know about their audiences, how their campaigns have been performing, what's working and what's not, and for that reason, powerful, effective reporting is needed, and Google Ads provides rich details reporting that covers almost every aspect of a business.

Incentivized

• Exportable insights at a brand, page, and placement level
• Segmentation API service to better manage first-party data
• Opportunity for non-custom implementation to allow for scalable solutions, such as programmatic backfill

• If you don't know what you're doing, it will be a costly mistake. You need to target ads, and it is difficult the first time to do that.
• There isn't a feature to run an add for a couple set date spans, just hours you want to run them or a single date span.

Incentivized

I think Google Ads is good for getting your company out there and becoming more visible to potential customers in general. However, for specific product launches, social media advertising might be a better fit. Also, our user base is younger so social media is a better channel for our target audience.

Incentivized

Intuitive and easy to use.

This is more of a subjective rating, because I think it can be increased with how much our ad spend is. The more of an ad spend, the more visibility we can get, and therefore all features can climb. With an overall larger presence the usability is that where we can get messages out quick, and that's the main thing we try to do with our campaigns.

Incentivized

Retail Media by Criteo's support at the start (with ERMS and Hooklogic) was pretty poor, with support SLAs exceeding 72 hours. This has changed over time to having a dedicated team--therefore the 7 rating and not 8.

We have not yet had an account rep who hasn't tried to bully me or other employees to raise our budgets. At the same time, several years ago, one attempted to help refine our ads and ended up changing the ads to be something we were not affiliated with

Incentivized

Daily use with advanced account structures. Familiarity with reporting/api and complex setups.

Cost of integration is low with Retail Media by Criteo, and Criteo's network of sponsored products is strong.

Our agency invests heavily in Google Ads (particularly paid search advertising) on behalf of our clients relative to competitors like Microsoft and Yahoo because Google is the top search engine in the world. Google collects the most search data which enables the company to improve its AI to drive better performance for agencies and brands. As such, our paid search and app install campaigns always start with Google. If a client has a large budget, we will allocate media dollars to other search engines, but in some cases, the entire search budget goes to Google because we see the best returns.

Incentivized

• Increased net revenue
• Increased profit
• CTR is unchanged (but this can be improved with better opportunities for targeting)

• Google Ads is often one of our highest ROI channels, especially when you factor in branded ads.
• Depending on the stage your business is in, search ads can be really powerful from an ROI perspective, providing an investment with a very high spend cap.
• If you do not manage the campaigns well though, you can quickly spend a lot of money on nothing. So make sure someone is keeping an eye on your account.

Incentivized