Yes, and the integration is straightforward. Criteo has an API like any major ad platform, and attribution tools pull its spend and match it against orders. ThoughtMetric, which sponsors this blog, added a Criteo integration on September 28 that maps where Criteo appears in each buyer’s journey. The hard part of measuring Criteo is not technical. Most Shopify brands use it for retargeting, and retargeting is the channel where the gap between credit and causation is widest.
How does Criteo count conversions?
Criteo’s help center lists a 30-day post-click window as its default attribution model, with view-through options available on top, including combinations like 30 days after a click plus one day after a view. Criteo also matches purchases to advertised products in configurable ways, so a sale can be credited when the buyer purchased the same product or something in the same category.
Thirty days is a long window for a channel whose audience is, by design, people who have already been to your site. Plenty of them were going to come back and buy within a month regardless. Criteo’s reported revenue will therefore include a meaningful number of orders it touched but did not cause.
What does a Criteo integration give you?
Spend and campaign data from Criteo, next to the orders your attribution tool matched to Criteo traffic using its own rules. That gives you a ROAS on revenue that actually reached your store, comparable with Meta and Google on the same terms.
ThoughtMetric frames its Criteo integration around seeing where Criteo sits in the customer journey, and that is the right lens. Multi-touch reporting shows whether Criteo ever appears early in a buyer’s path or only as the last click before a returning visitor converts. A channel that only ever closes is a channel you should test for incrementality before you trust its ROAS.
What should you look at for Criteo specifically?
New-customer share first. Retargeting mostly reaches people who already know you, so expect a low share of first-time buyers. If Criteo reports strong ROAS but almost all of it comes from returning customers, you are probably paying to re-acquire people your email flows would have brought back for free.
Then look at its position in the journey. Compare how often Criteo is the first touch against how often it is the last, and check the lag between the Criteo click and the order. A large share of orders landing weeks after the click suggests the click was incidental. I made the broader case for skepticism in is retargeting ROAS real, and Criteo is the purest version of that question.
How do you test whether Criteo is incremental?
Retargeting is unusually easy to test, because you control the audience. Hold out a random slice of your retargeting pool, say ten to twenty percent of site visitors, and exclude them from Criteo for a few weeks. Compare purchase rates between the held-out group and the exposed group. The difference is what Criteo actually adds. If your setup cannot do a clean audience split, a time-based pause works as a rougher substitute, as long as nothing else changes in the same period.
What does a healthy Criteo result look like?
A held-out group that buys noticeably less than the exposed group, a lag between click and order measured in days rather than weeks, and at least some new customers in the mix. Retargeting can earn its budget. The point of these checks is to find out how much of the reported revenue it actually earned, so you can set spend against that number rather than Criteo’s.
Common questions
Can I tell Criteo which sales my attribution tool credited to it? Yes. Criteo supports a deduplication parameter in its sales tag that tells it whether you attributed a transaction to Criteo. Using it brings Criteo’s own reporting closer to yours, which helps if your team still watches the Criteo dashboard.
Is Criteo only retargeting? No. It also sells prospecting and commerce media placements, and it is one of OpenAI’s technology partners for ChatGPT ads. For most Shopify brands, though, retargeting is the main use, and that is where the measurement questions concentrate.
Should I shorten Criteo’s attribution window? For reporting, looking at a seven-day click window next to the 30-day default is a quick way to see how much of Criteo’s credit comes from late conversions. Whether to change the setting itself depends on how your campaigns optimize, so talk to your account rep before you change it.
Does Criteo double count with Meta retargeting? Often, yes. If you retarget the same site visitors on Meta and Criteo, both platforms will claim many of the same returning buyers. An independent tool shows the overlap, and an audience holdout on one platform shows what each adds on top of the other.
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