Use Cases

With the Criteo API, you can architect custom and programmatic solutions to innovate and stay ahead. Take your advertising further and build what you need to grow your business. The Criteo API can help you in three primary ways:

• Operational efficiency: Automate manual functions so you can free up resources and scale your advertising programmatically
• Campaign piloting: Create, manage, and report on your campaigns
• Personalization: Use the API to personalize your advertising by sharing signals in and out of Criteo

We are actively building out our API roadmap and exploring ways to bring new value to your advertising. If you’re interested in thinking outside of the box and helping us pioneer new use cases, get in touch at developers@criteo.com. Here are a few examples of ways to leverage the API.

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Align your budget to meet your business needs

Bring your marketing activities closer to your business objectives. Real-world scenarios:

• A food delivery company manually increases its campaign bids at lunch and dinner times
• A sports company wants to increase its bids 24 hours before major games
• A fashion company increases bids on Sunday and Monday, when shoppers are more likely to buy online

While Criteo’s optimization models automatically adjust your bids for you, you may want enhanced controls to manage optimization. Using the Criteo API, you can schedule bid changes to align with your business needs and run without manual oversight. This can help optimize how your budget is spent, and make sure it spends in accordance with your customers’ known behaviors or environmental factors. Reach out to your Criteo team for advice on the best strategies to programmatically control your campaigns. Benefits:

• One-time set-up
• Optimize budgets and bidding
• Customize based on your business needs
• Automated campaign management

Steps:

• Using the PATCH /ad-sets endpoint, you can adjust your bidding at any time you decide
• You can schedule changes based on your specific needs, such as increasing your bids during peak hours or reducing during your off-peak times
• Set up different schedules for different campaigns, or set up one across all your campaigns

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Optimize budgets based on performance

Leverage insights to improve your campaigns. Real-world scenarios:

• A travel agency manually updates their bids every day based on their campaign performance of the last seven days
• A fashion retailer wants to change bids on different ad sets based on their performance
• An automotive marketplace wants to update bids on different ad sets within a campaign based on a “set of pre-defined rules”

Your advertising needs to be as real-time and agile as your business. Using the Criteo API you can adjust your campaigns, ad sets, and ads based on their performance. This can help you stay ahead without wasting time to make critical decisions. Benefits:

• React in real-time to optimize campaigns
• Align with changes in market and consumer trends
• Reduce operational workload

Steps:

• Using the Criteo API’s reporting endpoints, you can automatically retrieve performance data and compare it with other providers
• By looking at your results over a daily or weekly time period, you can define rules on your side for your spend to always follow your target
• You can then implement a feedback loop with your rules and your performance to adjust your bids accordingly with the PATCH /ad-sets endpoint, leading to a more efficient ROI and campaign performance

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Manage accounts and campaigns at scale

Automate campaign set-up to match business needs. Real-world scenarios:

• A travel company has an evolving “destination ads” restriction for specific regions. They want to share creative assets across their Criteo campaigns and marketing provider
• A CPG brand is launching a campaign across Europe and they want to automate their full campaign set-up for each of their nine countries

As your business evolves, ensure that your campaigns do too. Whether you’re expanding into new markets or running campaigns at scale, you need a way to easily share specifications across campaigns and automate your campaign set-up. With this operational efficiency, you can launch your campaigns and start driving the results you need. Benefits:

• Customize based on your business needs
• Automated campaign set-up
• Scale across multiple or growing accounts

Steps:

• Using Criteo’s campaign management endpoints, you can programmatically set-up your campaign to meet your needs
• Specify your settings at the campaign, ad set, or ad level for maximum control and customization
• Scale your set-up easily across multiple campaigns vs. manually setting up each one individually

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Manage creatives and ads at scale

Automate image and third-party creation based on your business needs. Common uses include:

• A subscription brand frequently creates readymade image creatives for their social campaigns
• A CPG brand uses a third-party ad server platform to build and host their creatives across each of their five markets

Benefits:

• Automated creative management based on your business needs
• Reduce workload
• Scale across multiple accounts

We are continuously exploring use cases to release in future versions. If you’re interested in a use case you don’t see here, get in touch at developers@criteo.com.