Dynamic Retargeting
Personalized Criteo product ads for visitors who left a product or cart page, with live price and stock.
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Criteo Commerce Growth
New Customer Acquisition with Criteo Commerce Audiences
Commerce Audiences lets you reach people who have never visited your site, using ready-made and custom audiences built from Criteo's shopping data. It runs inside Commerce Growth alongside retargeting. The real work here is not picking audiences but defining a new customer correctly; otherwise the campaign quietly sells to your past visitors and looks as if it brought new customers.
Purpose and appearance
What do we use this format for?
We use Commerce Audiences to win new customers for the brand by reaching people who have never visited your site but look active in your category in Criteo's shopping data. The campaign also grows the retargeting pool, and we judge acquisition cost by looking at the first order together with later purchases. For brands with a customer list, we target people similar to your most valuable buyers with Lookalike segments.
Funnel stages it serves
- Awareness
- Consideration
- Conversion
- Loyalty
Which Criteo Commerce Audiences segments we use
Criteo says it builds audiences from consented signals collected from more than 17,000 e-commerce sites, over 200 retailers and thousands of publishers. Audiences can come from the Criteo network, retailer data, your customer data or a mix. Of the eight segment types, we use these five most for new customer work; Events and Predictive types target existing users, so they stay out of this campaign:
- In-Market: users researching products or brands in your category. We usually start the first test here.
- Behavioral: segments built from shopping and browsing behavior on the open web.
- Lookalike: similar audiences derived from your customer list or store sales data.
- Prospecting: a wider-reach audience combining behavioral and contextual signals.
- Affinity: users whose interests are set by the publisher content they read; mainly for category awareness.
Defining and separating new customers
The most common setup error that breaks a new customer campaign is not excluding site visitors and existing buyers. When the audience is broad, the model finds the person who converts easily, and that is often someone who already knows you. So we exclude recent visitors with OneTag and buyers from the last year or two with a CRM list.
We also define a new customer together with the business: an email address that has never ordered, or a person with no order in the last twelve months? That decision directly changes the acquisition cost you will see in reports. Once the definition is clear, we apply the same rule to the exclusions in the Dynamic Retargeting campaign, so the two campaigns do not count the same person under different labels.
Why ads for people who do not know you need a different setup
In retargeting, the user has already seen the product and the ad reminds them. With a new customer, the ad is the first contact. So in the product cards from the feed, we push best sellers and entry-priced products forward and add the brand name and a shipping or returns benefit clearly to the template. Introductions through a single high-priced product rarely work; a wider selection that presents the category does better.
Measuring Criteo customer acquisition beyond first-order ROAS
We do not tie the new customer campaign to the same ROAS target as retargeting; the first order's value is low, and later orders matter. We match order data by customer ID through BigQuery or the order dashboard and track the first order and repeat purchases within 90 days separately. If you run Meta and Google campaigns with similar audiences, we also check how much the audiences overlap at this stage. We clarify which stage of the purchase funnel the campaign belongs to with funnel analysis.
New Customer Acquisition (Commerce Audiences): when do we recommend it?
We recommend it
- Brands already running retargeting efficiently on Criteo that want to reach new audiences from the same platform
- E-commerce sites with a customer list they want to build lookalike audiences from
- Catalogs with a wide range that can offer entry products to a category
- Teams that can judge new customer value by customer lifetime rather than the first order
We don't recommend it
- Accounts where even retargeting is not set up correctly and OneTag is incomplete
- Brands that expect a profit on the first order from new customers and cannot set aside a test budget
- Niche categories with very low estimated reach in the Criteo platform
How we manage New Customer Acquisition (Commerce Audiences)
- New customer ruleWe agree with the business how many months without an order makes someone count as new.
- Existing customer exclusionsWe remove recent visitors via OneTag and existing buyers via the CRM list.
- Segment testWe launch In-Market and Lookalike audiences in separate ad sets and compare them.
- Template and selectionWe add the brand name and a shipping or returns benefit to the DCO+ template and push entry-priced products forward.
- Repeat purchases by segmentWe track later orders from customers acquired through In-Market and Lookalike audiences separately.
New Customer Acquisition (Commerce Audiences): metrics and requirements
Metrics we track
- Cost per new customer
- New customer rate by segment
- First order value
- In-Market vs. Lookalike comparison
- 90-day repeat purchase
What you need to get started
- A working Criteo OneTag and product feed
- A KVKK-compliant customer list to exclude existing customers
- A data source that can report orders by customer ID
- A test budget kept separate from retargeting
Official sources
The Brand Move Criteo Team
Contact us nowTo learn more about New Customer Acquisition (Commerce Audiences) or other Criteo ad formats, contact The Brand Move Criteo team today.
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Frequently asked questions
New Customer Acquisition (Commerce Audiences): frequently asked questions
What are Criteo Commerce Audiences?
They are audiences built from Criteo's shopping data, such as In-Market, Behavioral, Lookalike, Prospecting and Affinity segments, used inside Commerce Growth to reach people who have not visited your site yet.
Which Commerce Audiences segments are open in our account?
Segment availability varies by account and category. During setup we check in the platform which segments are open and their estimated reach, and start the first test with the In-Market segment, which has the widest reach.
Is uploading our customer list to Criteo a problem under KVKK?
The list should contain only people whose data can be shared under your explicit consent and privacy notice (KVKK is Türkiye's personal data protection law), and emails must be sent hashed. We do not upload the list before clarifying this with your legal team; without a list, we exclude site visitors only.
Should a new customer campaign reduce our retargeting budget?
No, we keep the two budgets separate. Retargeting shows higher ROAS in the short term, so a new customer campaign always looks weaker in comparison. We judge the new customer campaign against its own acquisition cost target and repeat purchase data.
How do you stop Criteo counting existing customers as new?
By agreeing a written new customer definition, excluding recent visitors with OneTag and past buyers with a hashed CRM list, and applying the same rule to retargeting exclusions. We then check reported new customers against order data by customer ID.
Let's run a first New Customer Acquisition (Commerce Audiences) review together.
In a free call we review your audience, inventory needs and measurement setup, then tell you in writing which platform makes sense to start with.
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