At a glance
Criteo-attributed conversion value across catalogue retargeting, mid-funnel consideration, and Commerce Media Network. SUM(metrics.salesPostView + metrics.salesPostClick) at the advertiser-account level via Criteo Management API v2025-01. Criteo’s default attribution is 30-day post-click + 7-day post-view; this is what Criteo claims it influenced, not what your storefront ledger banks. Expect a 30 to 50% over-state versus commerce-platform UTM truth on healthy retargeting accounts because Criteo claims credit for view-through conversions Meta and Google would not.
| What it counts | Total order value Criteo claims attribution for in the window, summed across every active campaign. Includes lower-funnel retargeting, mid-funnel consideration, Commerce Media Network publisher placements, and sponsored-product retail-media. Reported in advertiser-account currency. |
| Cost basis | N/A on the revenue side. Spend is what you paid (CPC-dominant); revenue is what Criteo’s attribution model claims it drove. |
| Currency | Advertiser-account currency. Single per account. Multi-currency advertisers run separate accounts. No FX in this card. |
| Conversion attribution | 30-day post-click + 7-day post-view default. Configurable per advertiser (1, 7, 14, 30-day click windows; 1, 7-day view windows). View-through credit is generous: Criteo claims credit for any user who saw a Criteo ad and converted within 7 days, even if Meta or Google ran the closing click. |
| Attribution window | 30D click + 7D view default. Materially generous compared to Meta’s default 7D click + 1D view. |
| Conversions API impact | Material. Server-side conversion signal via Criteo Conversions API restores 10 to 25% of attributed revenue lost to iOS / Safari ITP. Without CAPI, expect attributed revenue to under-report by 15 to 30% on iOS-heavy accounts. |
| iOS 14.5+ ATT impact on the card | Severe. Pre-ATT, Criteo’s identity graph matched cross-publisher cookies with high precision; post-ATT, iOS audiences below the 25 to 40% opt-in rate are essentially invisible. Attributed revenue from iOS dropped 50 to 70% on most accounts after ATT rollout. The number reported is what Criteo can measure, not what was driven. |
| Catalogue-feed dependency | Catalogue gaps directly throttle revenue. If a top-seller exits the feed, the dynamic ads stop rendering and attributed revenue on that SKU drops to zero within 24 hours. Always pair revenue moves with feed-health checks. |
| Time window | T/7D/30D vsP (default 30D vs prior 30D). Real-time updates with up to 4-hour ingest lag on “today” plus a 24 to 48 hour view-through lookback that revises historical days upward. |
| Alert trigger | drop >20% vsP, fires when 30D revenue drops more than 20% versus the prior 30D window. Common causes: feed outage, attribution-tag regression, bid-strategy regression, or seasonal cliff (post-Cyber-Week, post-Easter). |
| Roles | owner, marketing, finance |
Calculation
Calculated automatically from your Criteo data. See the At a glance summary above for what the metric tracks and the worked example below for a typical reading.Worked example
A French electronics DTC retailer running Criteo for catalogue-feed retargeting + Commerce Media Network mid-funnel prospecting. The 30-day window is 02 Apr 26 to 01 May 26. Account currency EUR. Conversions API live for 11 months; 30-day click + 7-day view attribution.| Campaign | Spend (€) | Attributed revenue (€) | ROAS | Post-click share | Post-view share |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lower-funnel retargeting (PDP visitors, 30d) | 14,200 | 138,500 | 9.8× | 78% | 22% |
| Mid-funnel consideration (basket abandoners) | 6,800 | 51,200 | 7.5× | 71% | 29% |
| Commerce Media (publisher prospecting) | 4,400 | 12,400 | 2.8× | 52% | 48% |
| Sponsored product (retail media) | 1,600 | 7,800 | 4.9× | 88% | 12% |
| Account total (this card) | €27,000 | €209,900 | 7.8× | 73% | 27% |
- Lower-funnel retargeting carries 66% of attributed revenue on 53% of spend. Healthy. Retargeting against warm catalogue-viewers is Criteo’s strongest play; if this share dropped below 55% without budget reallocation, audience match has degraded (usually iOS / Safari ITP regression).
- Post-view credit is 27% of revenue, structurally higher than Meta or Google would claim. Criteo’s 7-day view-through window is generous; a chunk of this revenue would be credited to organic, email, or other paid channels under stricter attribution. For finance reporting, discount Criteo-claimed revenue by 25 to 40% to estimate incremental revenue.
- Commerce Media ROAS at 2.8× is the realistic prospecting ROAS band. Publisher-network prospecting is reaching cold to lukewarm shoppers; expect 2 to 4× ROAS, anything above 5× usually means the audience is not as cold as it appears (lookalike-of-purchasers leaking warm traffic into prospecting line items).
- Sponsored-product retail-media at 4.9× on €1,600 spend is doing brand-defence work. This is competitive-shelf protection on retail-partner search-results pages; the ROAS is real but it’s largely substituting for organic reach you’d otherwise get for free. Hold the line, don’t scale aggressively.
- Compared to commerce-platform UTM-attributed Criteo revenue (€134,000 in the same window), Criteo claims 57% more. This is the standard Criteo over-claim. The €76k delta is mostly view-through credits Criteo took for users who eventually converted via direct, organic, or email. For ROAS reporting to finance, use the commerce-platform UTM number; for in-platform optimisation, use Criteo’s number.
- The 30-day prior window had revenue €182,000 (ROAS 7.6×). Revenue up 15%; ROAS up modestly. Healthy scaling. If revenue had dropped 20%+ alongside stable spend, the 20%-drop alert would fire and the playbook is: (1) check catalogue-feed health first, (2) audit attribution tag firings, (3) check bid-strategy logs for an unintended switch.
- Revenue up + ROAS up = healthy expansion of an efficient scale window.
- Revenue up + spend up + ROAS flat = scale-out at constant efficiency.
- Revenue down + spend flat = audience saturation, attribution regression, or feed outage. Check feed first.
- Revenue down + spend down (proportional) = optimiser pulled back, often after iOS-attribution stress reduced its confidence in the auction.
- Post-view share rising above 35% = either iOS / Safari attribution stress (Criteo claiming more view-through to compensate) or generous attribution-window misconfiguration.
- A single-day revenue spike well above the 7-day rolling = late-arriving view-through conversions revising prior days upward. Normal; don’t act on a single-day reading.
Sibling cards merchants should reference together
Revenue on its own is meaningless without the spend context and the cross-channel reconciliation. Pair Total Revenue with these to get a full read:| Card | Why pair it with Criteo Total Revenue | What the combination tells you |
|---|---|---|
| Total Spend | The cost side. Revenue ÷ Spend = ROAS. | Whether the attributed revenue actually paid for itself. |
| ROAS | The ratio. Healthy retargeting ROAS sits at 7 to 11×. | Single-number efficiency read; if revenue rose with ROAS dropping, you scaled into less efficient inventory. |
| Spend by Campaign | Where the spend went. | Combined with revenue distribution, identifies which campaign types are actually monetising. |
| Conversion Lag | View-through latency. Critical for retargeting. | Today’s revenue often credits the prior 2 to 5 days of spend; lag rising is an iOS-attribution-stress signal. |
| Wasted Spend | Zero-revenue line items. | Identifies which campaigns are eating budget without producing the revenue this card sums. |
| Conversion Rate Trend | The conversion engine. | Revenue moves can come from CR moves (audience match drifted) or click-volume moves (auction shifted). |
| Shopify / BigCommerce / Adobe Total Revenue | The commerce-platform truth. | The reconciliation: Criteo-claimed revenue should be 60 to 80% of commerce-platform-tagged Criteo revenue (Criteo over-claims). Big drops in this ratio indicate attribution-tag failures. |
| GA4 Source Revenue | The third reconciliation source. GA4 last-click vs Criteo’s 30-day click + 7-day view. | Helps quantify Criteo’s view-through over-claim; the gap between GA4-attributed Criteo revenue and Criteo-claimed revenue is roughly the view-through tax. |
Reconciling against the vendor’s own dashboard
Where to look in Criteo’s own dashboard:Criteo Management Centre → Reporting → Performance Report → “Sales (PC + PV)” (filter to the same advertiser-account and date range used in this card).The “Sales” column (or “Sales (PC + PV)” on accounts that surface attribution-mix detail) sums post-click and post-view attributed sales, which is what this card sums. Criteo’s Home tile and the Performance Report header total reconcile within sub-percent rounding once view-through lookback has settled (allow 48 hours for each day’s number to stabilise). Why our number may legitimately differ from Criteo:
| Reason | Direction | Why |
|---|---|---|
| View-through lookback settle | Ours lower for recent days | Criteo’s 7-day view-through means yesterday’s number can revise upward over the next 7 days as conversions backfill against earlier ad views. Today’s reading is structurally low. Settle by day 8. |
| Attribution-window mismatch | Either direction | If the merchant changed attribution settings mid-window (e.g. tightened to 14-day click), historical days are restated by Criteo. Our card pulls fresh on each refresh; cached values may be stale. |
| Time zone | Boundary days off | Criteo reports in advertiser-account time zone; this card uses UTC. For 30-day windows the gap averages out; for “today” or “yesterday” the boundary can shift the figure 5 to 12% on US Pacific accounts. |
| Conversions API outages | Ours lower if CAPI is down | If Criteo Conversions API ingest fails (server-side endpoint returning errors), only client-side pixel conversions are captured. iOS and Safari conversions disproportionately disappear. The Performance Report and this card see the same gap; the fix is restoring the CAPI feed, not adjusting the card. |
| Currency | None expected | Both use advertiser-account currency. |
| Test-conversion contamination | Theirs marginally higher | Criteo’s UI may include test conversions (debug pixel firings, QA-tool transactions) that the API filters out. <0.5% of monthly revenue typically. |
| Source | Expected relationship | What causes legitimate divergence |
|---|---|---|
shopify.total_revenue / bigcommerce.total_revenue / adobe_commerce.total_revenue (filter to Criteo-tagged orders) | Commerce-platform UTM-attributed Criteo revenue should be 60 to 80% of Criteo-claimed revenue | Criteo over-claims via 7-day view-through; the gap is the view-through tax. If commerce platform UTM-attributed Criteo revenue exceeds Criteo’s claim, your tagging is broken (Criteo can’t see its own conversions). |
google_analytics.ga_revenue_by_source (Criteo source/medium) | GA4-last-click Criteo revenue should be 50 to 70% of Criteo-claimed | GA4 enforces last-click; Criteo claims 30D click + 7D view. The delta is view-through plus channel-overlap (a user who clicks Criteo, then later clicks Google Search direct, lands as Google in GA4 but Criteo in Criteo). |
facebook_ads.fac_total_revenue | Independent platform, NOT a reconciliation. | Different audience, different attribution. Compare in commerce-platform truth, not platform-claimed numbers. |
google_ads.gads_revenue | Independent platform, NOT a reconciliation. | Same as Meta. |
adroll.adr_total_revenue | Cross-retargeting peer. | Different audience pools and inventory; compare ROAS bands, not absolute revenue. |
Known limitations / merchant FAQs
Why does Criteo claim more revenue than my Shopify or BigCommerce store recorded for Criteo orders? Two reasons stack. First, Criteo’s 7-day post-view attribution claims credit for users who saw a Criteo ad and converted within 7 days, even if they completed via direct, organic, email, or another paid channel. Your commerce platform tags by last-click UTM, so it doesn’t capture view-through. Second, Criteo’s pixel and Conversions API may capture conversions slightly differently from your platform’s order tagging (e.g. UTMs stripped during checkout, currency-conversion rounding, refund handling). Expect Criteo to over-claim by 30 to 50% versus commerce-platform UTM-tagged Criteo revenue. This is the view-through tax. For finance reporting, use the commerce-platform number; for in-platform optimisation, use Criteo’s. My Criteo revenue dropped 25% week-on-week, what should I check? On Criteo specifically, the diagnostic order is:- Catalogue feed health, open Criteo Feed Manager → Diagnostics. Top-seller out-of-stock, image-rejection, or price-mismatch suppression all collapse revenue within 24 hours.
- Conversions API health, check Criteo’s Pixel & Tag Manager for CAPI errors. A broken CAPI feed loses 15 to 30% of attributed revenue on iOS-heavy accounts.
- Pixel firings, Criteo’s client-side pixel can be blocked by content-security-policy changes, GDPR consent-banner regressions, or third-party-script blockers. Check tag-fire rate vs the previous week.
- Bid strategy regression, if the auto-bidder hit a CPA target and pulled back delivery, revenue drops with spend. This is healthy, not a bug.
- Seasonal cliff, post-Cyber-Week, post-Easter, post-Father’s-Day weeks routinely drop 20 to 35% on retargeting.
sales field. Use Spend by Campaign and the per-campaign breakdown to isolate Commerce Media revenue if needed.
My retargeting ROAS is 12×; is Criteo over-claiming?
Probably not. Healthy retargeting ROAS bands sit at 7 to 11× on Criteo, with strong performers reaching 12 to 15×. Above 15× is suspicious: usually it means the audience is leaking warmer than intended (e.g. retargeting line item is matching to the merchant’s email-list audience, double-counting users who would convert from email). Audit audience-pool overlap. Below 5× on retargeting suggests audience degradation (iOS / Safari ITP) or feed-quality drift.
My Conversions API broke last week; will the historical revenue numbers heal?
Partially. Criteo will not retroactively replay missed CAPI events. Once the feed is restored, future events flow correctly, but the 2 to 7 days of missing iOS / Safari conversions during the outage are permanently lost from the report. Plan to communicate this gap to finance and treat the outage week as a measurement gap, not a real revenue drop.
Is Criteo revenue reported gross or net of refunds and returns?
Gross. Criteo records the order value at the point of conversion; subsequent refunds, returns, or order cancellations on the merchant side are not reflected. For net-revenue reporting, reconcile against the commerce-platform ledger (Shopify Orders, BigCommerce Orders, Adobe Commerce Orders) at month-end. The gap between Criteo gross and merchant-side net is typically 8 to 18% on apparel and electronics; closer to 3 to 5% on consumables.