Criteo Dynamic Retargeting vs Smaato

Likelihood to Recommend

Criteo Dynamic Retargeting is well suited for every kind of action related to hot leads / customers regarding your business. It's a good way to increase the conversion rates of the funnel and always works really well for that kind of audience. On the other hand, you need to ensure that you have built a minimum size audience to let the algorithm work properly.

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Quim Giralt Bosch

User Acquisition Specialist

Tangelo Games Corp.Gambling & Casinos, 51-200 employees

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Smaato is very well suited for user acquisition and retargeting companies. Their overlap in terms of audiences and publishers with other exchanges is very limited, which makes it a great alternative when you need to scale a campaign and want to maintain your frequency cap. They work very well in branding campaigns as well as performance campaigns.

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Gabriela Band

Sales Specialist

OgilvyInternet, 10,001+ employees

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Feature Rating Comparison

Criteo Dynamic Retargeting

Smaato

Data Transfer

DSP integration

Criteo Dynamic Retargeting

Smaato

Ad campaign creation

Ad deployment

Display advertising

Ad display and retargeting segmentation

Criteo Dynamic Retargeting

Smaato

Ad dashboards

Ad performance reports

Ad conversion tracking

Ad attribution reporting

Cross-channel ad management

Ad forecasting and optimization

Pros

The first strenght of Criteo Retargeting is the user-friendly platform, where you can easily manage your budget and analyse the performance.
Secondly, the CPC based model is great advantage of Criteo compare to some competitors.
Finally, the post-click attribution. It is more trustworthy and tenable than post-view.

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Baptiste CROENNE

Responsable - SEA

Infopro digitalWriting and Editing, 1001-5000 employees

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Fill - the ad requests we send to Smaato have seen a great requests-to-impression ration.
Revenue - We've seen a lift in overall revenue thanks to the high CPM bids we get from Smaato.
Payments are always on time and they have a responsive financial team that is helpful in answering any questions.
Customer service - They are very fast to respond to any issues. The set up was streamlined thanks to their professional customer service.

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Julian Salinas

Manager, Ad Operations

Whisper AppInternet, 51-200 employees

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Cons

Level of control over ads - Most features of Criteo can't be managed directly in the dashboard. That can be a problem when you want ads adjusted quickly, for example, if you make a change to your logo. Customer Service has to be contacted in that case.
Cost - Of the several retargeting platforms we tried, Criteo was the most costly. This is in terms of cost per click and cost per conversion. In the end, we just couldn't justify paying substantially more for a similar ad network to Google just for the level of customer service.
Reporting - There is no reporting provided automatically, and user data is gated; it was difficult for us to ascertain anything about the audience we were serving ads to, and even basic geographic data wasn't available to us.

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Verified User

Employee in Marketing

Marketing and Advertising Company, 11-50 employees

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Inventory can be a bit pricey in competitive markets like the US.
Reporting dashboard is limited, needs work.
They don't offer a lof of transparency about margins over media cost.

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Gabriela Band

Sales Specialist

OgilvyInternet, 10,001+ employees

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Likelihood to Renew

Criteo Dynamic Retargeting 10.0

Based on 1 answer

Criteo is the only remarketing firm worth using for a retailer, in my opinion.

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Joe Preston

SEO

Pipeline Success IncRetail, 11-50 employees

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No score

No answers yet

No answers on this topic

Usability

No score

No answers yet

No answers on this topic

Smaato 8.0

Based on 1 answer

Smaato has a UI where you can control your line items on the traffic you want to receive. That is a key unique selling point that other SSPs don't offer. Most of the items that you will need like reporting can be done on a self serve manner and that is a big plus, specifically for changes that need to happen really fast and you don't need to deal with account managers that may take some time to answer emails.

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Gabriela Band

Sales Specialist

OgilvyInternet, 10,001+ employees

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Support Rating

No score

No answers yet

No answers on this topic

Smaato 7.0

Based on 1 answer

Smaato's account management team is very professional. They are quite fast in terms of customer support, which is very helpful. One item that stands out is that they are willing to understand what you need for each campaign and what is the best way to move forward. They don't just jump quickly into trying to upsell more of Smaato's products (audiences, data) like other SSPs do.

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Gabriela Band

Sales Specialist

OgilvyInternet, 10,001+ employees

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Alternatives Considered

I prefer AdRoll when it comes to retargeting. We selected Criteo due to the client requesting we test it out. Criteo is much harder to manage and to date has provided less than stellar ROAS. Criteo, however, is much better than using the Google Display Network on AdWords. Retargeting through Google was a nightmare to manage (so many inappropriate and irrelevant placements!) and led to very few conversions.

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Verified User

Strategist in Other

Marketing and Advertising Company, 1-10 employees

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With over 20 demand partners in our stack, Smaato is in the top 5

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Julian Salinas

Manager, Ad Operations

Whisper AppInternet, 51-200 employees

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Return on Investment

Bad ROI at start (first month) - When you launch a new campaign, COS is very high for a few weeks. I thought it was going to take less time for the algorithm to be effective.
Good ROI after that - After a few weeks, our COS started to get better!
More traffic
Some people complain about being too much retargeted

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Verified User

Manager in Marketing

Textiles Company, 11-50 employees

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Increased overall revenue
Strong demand pool
Easy reporting

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Julian Salinas

Manager, Ad Operations

Whisper AppInternet, 51-200 employees

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Pricing Details

General

Free Trial

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Free/Freemium Version

—

Premium Consulting/Integration Services

—

Entry-level set up fee?

No

General

Free Trial

—

Free/Freemium Version

—

Premium Consulting/Integration Services

—

Entry-level set up fee?

No

Rating Summary

Criteo Dynamic Retargeting

Smaato

Criteo Dynamic Retargeting

Smaato

Criteo Dynamic Retargeting

Smaato

Criteo Dynamic Retargeting

Smaato

Likelihood to Recommend