Criteo Commerce Max vs. Google Ad Manager

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.

It is only suited for marketing. Make sure you have analytics on your site to track the people coming, final sales, and conversions because it is at it's best when you can use it to really read and understand the data at hand. Google Ads does everything it needs to in ads, and you don't need to be an expert to begin with it. However, I would not just tell someone to "go create an account" if they know very little about digital ads. Consult with someone first. It can be a little daunting if you were to do that!

Incentivized

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

• Hyper targeting - I love how we can target, analyze, and then hyper target [advertisements] to our audiences to be able to hyper target the audiences that convert best. [Audiences besides] Google understands them, but also demographics, locations, search terms, and more.
• Advanced reporting - Without Google's seemingly endless ways to read and break down reports, we would not be able to best make decisions to maximize ROI.
• Strong conversion algorithm updates - The algorithm has become impressively strong for 'maximized conversions' and 'smart' campaigns. [That's] coming from someone who hated these portions of the algorithm until about 2019 where the updates (and continued updates) have worked incredibly well for these algorithms' purpose.

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

• Sometimes it can bog down and crash. This is rare, but it is processing a lot of steps/changes all at once and it's not expected to be perfect.
• Being able to quickly filter by campaign types would be nice (PPC/Display/Video Pre-roll). Our fix is to run these campaigns in totally separate accounts, so there is no overlapping in reporting/etc. This helps with seeing stats clearly without having to filter constantly.
• It could be visually prettier.

Incentivized

I think it's useful for our team and we rely on it to improve our business. It is within our budget also. Although we still will need an approval from the upper-level management team, I don't see any problem with that

Incentivized

Intuitive and easy to use.

Love the product and how the GUI is as it is user friendly. When working with the product it is better to have some knowledge of what ad's you want to deploy where so that it is easier to use and move forward.

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.

I could say a lot about this topic. As an agency, we get a new [representative] to talk to almost every quarter to go over select accounts and the campaigns within. Most of the time, these [educated representatives], don't provide any new feedback, or I just simply [disagree] with their approach. This is not all the time however. I have learned a lot from a rare few, [individuals] that have given me new strategies and access to betas early on. The other side of support, is the [overseas support platform]. [It] is usually not very helpful, but you can [emphasize] issues and they can research [them]. The Google Tag Implementation team is pristine though. When you need them, you need to set an appointment, which is usually 2 weeks out; they are so over-my-head intelligent, I've never had a bad experience with them and whenever I needed them for a fix, they solved it [within] the first call.

Incentivized

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

As I alluded to earlier, you kind of have to be on Google if you want to search marketing. I've tried Bing Ads and I just don't see the same volume or quality. With dwindling targeting abilities on social media sites like Facebook, Google is still tall and mighty and helps us with intent-based targeting rather than just interest-based targeting.

Incentivized

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

• It has made the data from this accessible for all of my team to see.
• The ability to make changes can be bad - if the team does not agree.
• Getting current results lets us decide what needs to be changed and take their advice to see how things could improve.

Incentivized