> ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.vortexiq.ai/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Total Spend, Criteo > Total Spend for Criteo stores. Tracked live in Vortex IQ Nerve Centre. How to read it, why it matters, and how to act on it. **Metrics type:** [Key Metrics](/nerve-centre/overview#metrics-types-explained) • **Category:** [Ad Platform](/nerve-centre/connectors#connectors-by-type) ## At a glance > Gross media spend on Criteo across catalogue-driven retargeting, prospecting, and Commerce Media Network campaigns. **`SUM(spend)`** at the advertiser-account level. Criteo's bid model is dynamic CPC at engine layer, with CPA-target overlays available; the card sums what Criteo billed regardless of the underlying bid type. Stronger in EU and APAC than the US, with the deepest catalogue-feed retargeting in the industry: Criteo serves dynamic product-detail-page (PDP) ads pulled from your live product feed, so feed freshness directly affects spend efficiency and ROAS. | | | | ------------------------------------ | ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | **What it counts** | Gross media spend at the *advertiser-account* level, summed across every active campaign in the period. Includes lower-funnel retargeting, mid-funnel consideration, and Commerce Media Network (Criteo's retail-media product placement on partner publisher sites). Excludes platform service fees and managed-service overlays (those bill separately and aren't in API-reported `spend`). | | **Cost basis** | **CPC-dominant.** Criteo's auction is mostly CPC-priced at line-item level, with CPM-priced inventory on a small subset of premium placements. The auto-bidder optimises toward CPA targets; the card sums whatever was billed regardless of bid mechanism. | | **Currency** | Advertiser-account currency (single, set at account creation). Multi-currency advertisers run separate Criteo accounts per currency. No FX in this card. | | **Conversion attribution** | **Not relevant for spend** (spend is what you paid; attribution is on the revenue side). For ROAS pairing: Criteo defaults to 30-day post-click + 7-day post-view attribution, configurable per advertiser. | | **Attribution window** | N/A for spend. (For ROAS pairing: 30-day click + 7-day view default.) | | **Bot / invalid traffic** | Criteo claims TAG-certified IVT filtering; detected invalid traffic is removed pre-billing. Real-world IVT slippage is \<1% on Criteo's owned-and-operated supply, materially higher (3, 6%) on long-tail Commerce Media partners. | | **iOS 14.5+ ATT impact on the card** | None on the spend figure itself, you still pay for clicks and impressions. Indirectly, ATT and Safari ITP shrunk Criteo's identity graph by an estimated 50, 70% on iOS / Safari traffic, so the auto-bidder shifts spend toward in-market retail-media placements and lookalike inventory where Criteo retains identity match. CPCs on retargeting line items typically rose 15, 30% post-ATT to maintain reach. | | **Catalogue-feed dependency** | **Spend is throttled by catalogue freshness.** If your product feed has stale or missing items, Criteo's dynamic ads cannot serve those products, the auto-bidder pulls back budget into whatever's still in-feed. A feed outage of 24h+ typically drops spend by 30, 60% on retargeting line items because Criteo can't render the dynamic creative. | | **Time window** | `T/7D/30D vsP` (default 30D vs the prior 30D). Real-time updates with up to 4-hour ingest lag on "today". | | **Alert trigger** | `spike >2σ vs 30D baseline`. Single-day jump beyond two standard deviations of the rolling baseline. Usual cause: a new campaign launching, a budget cap lift, or a catalogue-feed re-sync that unlocked previously-stalled inventory. | | **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. Catalogue feed refreshes hourly via Criteo Feed Manager. | Campaign | Spend (€) | Clicks | Impressions | Avg CPC | Catalogue items in feed | | ---------------------------------------------- | ----------- | ---------- | -------------- | --------- | ----------------------- | | Lower-funnel retargeting (PDP visitors, 30d) | 14,200 | 38,400 | 9,800,000 | €0.37 | 4,820 active SKUs | | Mid-funnel consideration (basket abandoners) | 6,800 | 18,200 | 4,200,000 | €0.37 | 2,140 active SKUs | | Commerce Media (publisher network prospecting) | 4,400 | 9,800 | 11,200,000 | €0.45 | 1,820 active SKUs | | Sponsored product (retail media) | 1,600 | 5,200 | 480,000 | €0.31 | 380 priority SKUs | | **Account total (this card)** | **€27,000** | **71,600** | **25,680,000** | **€0.38** | **4,820 unique SKUs** | What the spend pattern tells you: 1. **Lower-funnel retargeting eats 53% of spend on 38% of clicks.** Retargeting CPCs run higher than prospecting because the auctions are warmer and Criteo bids more aggressively for users with PDP-view signal. ROAS compensates: typical Criteo retargeting ROAS is 7, 11×, materially better than the 1.5, 3× expected on cold prospecting. If retargeting ROAS is below 5×, audience match has degraded (usually iOS / Safari ITP). 2. **Commerce Media at €0.45 CPC is structurally higher than retargeting.** You're competing against other advertisers for placement on publisher product-comparison pages and catalogue-driven editorial inventory. The trade-off is reach into a shopping-intent audience that retargeting cannot access. Expect Commerce Media ROAS in the 2, 4× band. 3. **Sponsored product (retail media) at €0.31 CPC is the cheapest because it's keyword + category targeted on retail partner sites.** Lowest CPC, but inventory is capped by partner availability; you can't scale this beyond your priority-SKU allocation. 4. **The catalogue has 4,820 active SKUs but spend is concentrated on a smaller set.** Criteo's auto-optimiser concentrates spend on the SKUs with strongest conversion-rate signal, typically the top 300, 600 SKUs absorb 70, 80% of dynamic-ad impressions. If your top-seller SKU goes out-of-stock and exits the feed, expect a 15, 30% spend drop within 48 hours as the optimiser scrambles for replacement creative. 5. **Pre-feed-refresh-fix on this account, spend was running at €19,400 with 12% feed gaps.** After Criteo Feed Manager moved to hourly sync (from daily), feed gaps dropped to \<2% and spend recovered to €27,000 because more SKUs are auction-eligible. **Catalogue freshness is the single biggest spend lever on Criteo accounts**, more than bid strategy, more than budget caps. 6. **The 30-day prior window had spend €23,800, ROAS 6.2×.** Spend up 13%; track ROAS in [`cri_roas`](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/criteo/roas) to confirm scaling is healthy. If ROAS dropped below 5× alongside the spend rise, the auto-optimiser is buying lower-quality inventory or feed quality slipped. 7. **iOS share is 38% on this account** (lower than US norms because it's France, where Android leads). Post-ATT impact is real but less severe than on US accounts; expect retargeting CPMs 10, 20% higher than pre-ATT, vs 30, 50% higher in the US. Quick sanity tests: * Spend up + ROAS flat = healthy scaling. * Spend up + ROAS down = scaling beyond efficient frontier, or feed quality dropped. * Spend flat + clicks up = CPCs falling, optimiser found cheaper inventory. * Spend dropped 20%+ overnight = check catalogue feed first (Criteo Feed Manager → Diagnostics). Feed outages or category-level rejection are the most common cause. * Spend dropped 15% with stable feed = competitive auction heat, a competitor entered the auction or Criteo's bid floor moved. * Spend rose 25%+ with stable feed and budget caps = auto-bidder runaway; pause and contact Criteo client services. ## Sibling cards merchants should reference together | Card | Why it matters next to Total Spend | What the combination tells you | | --------------------------------------------------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | [Total Revenue](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/criteo/total-revenue) | The revenue side. Criteo-attributed conversion value for the same period. | Spend trend without revenue trend is meaningless. Criteo's attribution is generous; expect claimed revenue to over-state by 30, 50% versus commerce-platform UTM truth. | | [ROAS](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/criteo/roas) | The ratio. The headline efficiency reading. | Retargeting platform ROAS should land 6, 10×; Criteo specifically tends 7, 11× on healthy catalogue-feed-driven accounts. | | [Spend vs Budget](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/criteo/spend-vs-budget) | Pacing. Are you on track, over-pacing, or under-pacing? | Catches auto-bidder runaway and budget exhaustion before month-end surprises. | | [Spend by Campaign](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/criteo/spend-by-campaign) | Per-campaign breakdown. | Lower-funnel retargeting typically eats 50, 70% of spend; if mid-funnel or Commerce Media dominates, you've shifted away from Criteo's strongest format. | | [CPC Trend](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/criteo/cpc-trend) | Auction pressure proxy. | Rising CPCs without rising click volume = competitive heat eating budget without reach. | | [CTR Trend](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/criteo/ctr-trend) | Catalogue-creative effectiveness. | Falling CTR while spend climbs = creative fatigue or feed quality drift. Refresh creative or audit the feed. | | [Wasted Spend](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/criteo/wasted-spend) | Zero-conversion campaigns. | Pause-or-fix list. Typically 5, 12% of spend is wasted on accounts with 6+ campaigns running. | | [Conversion Lag](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/criteo/conversion-lag) | View-through latency. Critical for retargeting. | Today's spend often credits revenue 2, 5 days from now; lag rising signals iOS attribution stress. | ## Reconciling against the vendor's own dashboard **Where to look in Criteo's own dashboard:** > [Criteo Management Centre → Reporting → Performance Report → "Spend"](https://commerce.criteo.com) (filter to the same advertiser-account and date range used in this card). The "Spend" column in the Performance Report is the same field this card sums. Criteo's *Home* dashboard tile shows the same headline figure for the chosen window. For granular sanity checks, *Reporting → Custom Report → Group by Day* shows daily spend rows that should sum to this card's total within sub-percent rounding. For Commerce Media Network advertisers, the relevant view sits under *Commerce Max → Performance*; both surfaces share the same underlying API field (`metrics.spend` in Criteo Management API v2025-01). **Why our number may legitimately differ from Criteo itself:** A small gap is normal. Usual suspects: | Reason | Direction | Why | | --------------------------------------- | --------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ | | **Time zone** | Boundary days off | Criteo reports in the advertiser-account time zone (set at account creation, mutable via client-services request). Vortex IQ uses UTC for period boundaries. For 30-day windows the gap averages out; for "today" or "yesterday" on US Pacific accounts the boundary can shift the figure 4 to 10%. | | **Ingest lag** | Ours lower for "today" | Criteo Management API has a 2 to 4 hour lag on impressions and spend; today's number is incomplete until catchup. Yesterday and earlier are stable. | | **Managed-service overlay** | Theirs higher in some views | Criteo's *Billing* surface (Settings → Billing → Statement) bundles managed-service fees, audit add-ons, and Commerce Yield optimiser fees for accounts on full-service plans. The Performance Report's "Spend" column is media-only and matches this card. Don't reconcile against Billing for performance reads. | | **Catalogue-feed-restated impressions** | Ours marginally higher | Criteo periodically re-credits impressions where the dynamic creative rendered against a since-removed SKU (typically \<0.5% of monthly spend). The Performance Report shows pre-credit; the invoice is post-credit. Reconcile to invoice for finance, not for performance. | | **Currency** | None expected | Both views use advertiser currency. | | **Archived campaigns** | Ours captures them | Criteo's UI hides archived-campaign spend from default reports; the API returns the full history. Our card includes everything in the date range. | **Cross-connector reconciliation:** This card is *Criteo-only*; Criteo's `spend` figure has no direct counterpart on other platforms. For merchants running parallel retargeting on multiple platforms, the reasonable comparison set is: | Card | Expected relationship | What causes legitimate divergence | | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ | | [`adroll.adr_total_spend`](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/adroll/total-spend) | Independent retargeting platform spend. No mathematical relationship; useful as a benchmark of how much the merchant invests on each retargeting vendor. | Different inventory: AdRoll skews toward GDN + Facebook Audience Network display; Criteo skews toward open-exchange catalogue retargeting and its own Commerce Media Network. | | [`facebook_ads.fac_total_spend`](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/facebook-ads/total-spend) | Different funnel position. Meta is top-of-funnel + retargeting; Criteo is heavy retargeting + mid-funnel commerce. | Most DTC accounts spend 3 to 7× more on Meta than on Criteo; if Criteo is more than 30% of Meta spend, retargeting allocation is unusually heavy. | | [`google_ads.gads_spend`](/nerve-centre/google_ads/gads_spend) | Different funnel position. Google is intent-driven (search + shopping); Criteo is awareness/retargeting. | No reconciliation, comparable benchmark only. | | [`shopify.total_revenue`](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/shopify/total-revenue) / [`bigcommerce.total_revenue`](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/bigcommerce/total-revenue) / [`adobe_commerce.total_revenue`](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/adobe-commerce/total-revenue) | Commerce-platform revenue is the ultimate denominator for Criteo's ROAS claim; sanity-check Criteo-claimed revenue against the realised order line in your store. | Criteo attributes generously: 30 to 50% over-state versus commerce-platform UTM truth is normal on healthy retargeting accounts. Use the store ledger as the source of truth for ROAS, Criteo's number for in-platform optimisation. | ***
Documentation cross-reference (catalogue-feed gotchas) Criteo's spend behaviour is unusually sensitive to catalogue-feed health. Because dynamic ads render product-detail-page (PDP) creative pulled directly from the merchant's product feed, any feed gap (out-of-stock SKUs, taxonomy errors, image-rejection, price-mismatches against the landing page) directly throttles spend: Criteo's bid engine refuses to spend on SKUs it can't render. **A 24-hour feed outage typically drops daily spend 30 to 60% on retargeting line items.** Pre-iOS 14.5, Criteo's identity graph was the strongest in catalogue retargeting (deep cross-publisher cookie sync gave it best-in-class user match across PDP visitors and abandoners). Post-ATT and post-Safari ITP, the iOS audience pool collapsed by an estimated 50 to 70%; **spend remained stable, but the audience match rate degraded**. A flat spend trend can therefore mask serious efficiency loss. Always pair this card with [`cri_roas`](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/criteo/roas) and [`cri_conversion_rate_trend`](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/criteo/conversion-rate-trend). If spend is held but ROAS or conversion rate dropped, the optimiser is buying impressions against an audience that no longer matches well. The standard mitigations (in order of impact) are: deploy Criteo's first-party Identity Graph, push server-side conversion signal via the Conversions API, and refresh creative every 14 to 21 days to fight fatigue on the residual matchable audience.
## Known limitations / merchant FAQs **Why is my Criteo spend higher than my Criteo invoice?** The Performance Report (and this card) shows pre-credit gross media spend; the invoice reflects post-credit billing after Criteo applies catalogue-rejection credits, IVT credits from MOAT or IAS verification, and any client-services goodwill credits. The difference is typically 0.5 to 1.5% on monthly spend; bigger gaps usually mean a credit dispute is in flight. Reconcile to invoice for finance reporting; reconcile to this card for performance decisions. **My spend dropped 30% overnight, what should I check first?** On Criteo specifically, **the catalogue feed is the first place to look**, not the bid strategy. Open Criteo Feed Manager → Diagnostics. The five most common causes (in order): 1. **Feed sync failure**, hourly or daily catalogue push silently failed; active SKU count collapsed and dynamic ads cannot render. 2. **Top-seller out-of-stock**, the SKUs absorbing 30 to 50% of impressions exited the feed. The optimiser scrambles for replacement creative; spend dips for 24 to 72 hours during re-learning. 3. **Image rejection**, Criteo's image-quality filter rejected a batch of product images (low resolution, watermarks, banned overlay text). The affected SKUs are auction-ineligible until images are fixed. 4. **Price-mismatch suppression**, Criteo's price-on-feed and price-on-landing-page audit found mismatches above tolerance. Affected SKUs are paused. Common after a sale-price launch where the feed updates lag the storefront. 5. **Auto-bidder pulled back**, ROAS dropped below the configured CPA target (often after iOS-attribution stress) and the optimiser is throttling delivery. **Why does Criteo spend look so different from AdRoll or Meta on the same audience?** Different inventory and bidding logic. AdRoll buys mostly Google Display Network and Facebook Audience Network; Criteo runs its own Commerce Media Network with deep open-exchange catalogue retargeting plus retail-media product placement on partner publishers; Meta is closed Facebook + Instagram. **There is no apples-to-apples spend comparison.** The honest cross-platform read is on outcome (ROAS or CPA), not on input spend. Use [`cri_total_revenue`](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/criteo/total-revenue) and [`cri_roas`](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/criteo/roas) for the cross-platform read. **iOS 14.5 ATT and Safari ITP, what do they actually do to my Criteo spend?** The spend figure itself is unaffected, you still pay for impressions and clicks. What ATT and ITP broke is the *targeting precision* on iOS users who declined the prompt and Safari users with full ITP enforcement (60 to 75% combined opt-out across UK and US iOS traffic). Criteo can no longer reliably identify those users across publisher sites, which: * Shrinks retargetable audience pools (typically 50 to 70% smaller post-ATT for retargeting line items). * Forces the auto-optimiser onto broader, cheaper inventory to hit pacing. * Compresses ROAS without reducing spend. **Practical action**: enable Criteo's first-party Identity Graph and deploy server-side Conversions API. On audited rollouts, both narrow the gap by 10 to 25% ROAS recovery on iOS-heavy accounts. **Does this card include Criteo's Commerce Media Network spend?** **Yes**, if your Criteo account runs Commerce Media campaigns (publisher-network prospecting and retail-media sponsored-product placements), spend rolls into the same `spend` field. The line items appear under their own campaign type in [Spend by Campaign](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/criteo/spend-by-campaign). To isolate retargeting-only spend, filter on campaign type in the breakdown card. **Can I trust the "today" spend?** Less than the rolling 7-day. Criteo Management API has a 2 to 4 hour ingest lag and Commerce Media settles nightly; today's spend is structurally low until catchup. Yesterday is fully reliable. **Don't restructure budgets based on a single day's reading**, use the 7-day rolling for in-week decisions. **My multi-currency setup, how does spend work?** Criteo advertiser accounts are single-currency by design; multi-currency merchants run separate accounts per currency. Each account reports spend in its own currency. This card is per-account. For unified-currency reporting across regions, FX-convert externally at month-end rates; Criteo doesn't surface a unified-currency total. **Does Criteo's Commerce Yield optimiser change how I read this card?** Commerce Yield (Criteo's managed-bidder option) shifts more spend toward the highest-ROAS auctions and away from constant-pacing. The card sums total spend regardless, but you may see daily-level variance increase by 30 to 60% under Commerce Yield because the bidder front-loads spend on high-conversion-probability days (e.g. Sunday evenings on US apparel accounts). **Daily variance is normal under Commerce Yield**; weekly variance vs plan is the right baseline. **Should I optimise for absolute spend, ROAS, or CPA on Criteo?** Depends on funnel position. For lower-funnel retargeting line items (PDP visitors, basket abandoners), optimise for ROAS, retargeting ROAS should sit at 7 to 11× because the audience is warm. For Commerce Media prospecting, optimise for CPA against your blended target, ROAS will be lower (2 to 4×) but it's reaching audiences retargeting cannot. For sponsored-product retail-media, optimise for incremental revenue against organic search rank, this is a brand-defence spend, not a pure ROAS play. *** ### Tracked live in Vortex IQ Nerve Centre *Total Spend* is one of hundreds of KPI pulses Vortex IQ tracks across Criteo and 70+ other ecommerce connectors. Nerve Centre runs the detection layer; Vortex Mind investigates the cause when something moves; Ask Viq lets you interrogate any number in plain English. [Start for free](https://app.vortexiq.ai/login) or [book a demo](https://www.vortexiq.ai/contact-us) to see this metric running on your own data.