At a glance
A real-time alert that fires when a dynamic campaign accumulates a burst of zero-conversion spend over a short trailing window. The most common cause on Criteo is specific and fixable: the product feed got rejected or went stale, Criteo’s dynamic creative could not render the intended product-detail-page ads, the creative fell back to generic, and conversion rate collapsed toward zero while the auto-bidder kept spending. Unlike the trailing-30-day Wasted Spend bucket, which is a slow audit list, this card is a fast-twitch burst detector tuned to catch a feed-driven creative failure within hours so you can stop the bleed before it compounds across a full reporting period.
| What it counts | Cumulative spend on a dynamic campaign over the recent trailing window (illustratively the last 72 hours) that produced zero attributed conversions, when that spend exceeds a configured currency threshold. The alert is the breach; the displayed value is the burst spend and the offending campaign. |
| Cost basis | CPC-dominant. The burst is real billed cost. Generic fallback creative still costs money per click, it just does not convert, which is what makes a feed failure so expensive. |
| Currency | Advertiser-account currency. The threshold is set in account currency. |
| Conversion attribution | 30-day post-click + 7-day post-view default. The generous window makes “zero conversions over 72 hours” a strong signal, if Criteo cannot even claim a single view-through credit, the creative genuinely is not working. |
| Attribution window | 30D click + 7D view default. Allow a short grace for lagged credit before treating a burst as confirmed waste. |
| Bot / invalid traffic | Excluded from the conversion count; filtered pre-billing on the spend side. |
| iOS 14.5+ ATT impact on the card | Moderate. ATT can produce a false-positive burst on an iOS-heavy dynamic campaign where conversions are happening but Criteo cannot attribute them. Cross-check the store ledger before pausing an iOS-heavy campaign on this alert alone. |
| Catalogue-feed dependency | This card is fundamentally about feed health. A rejected, stale, or partially-failed feed is the single most common trigger. The first diagnostic step is always Criteo Feed Manager Diagnostics. |
| Time window | RT evaluated over a short trailing window (illustratively 72 hours). Short by design so a creative failure is caught in hours, not at month-end. |
| Alert trigger | zero-conversion-spend >$X in last 72h on any dynamic campaign. An illustrative threshold; the breach fires when a dynamic campaign’s zero-conversion spend over the window crosses the configured currency ceiling. |
| 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 German DTC footwear retailer runs three dynamic retargeting campaigns on Criteo. On 14 Jun 26 a feed schema change on the storefront broke the price field mapping, and Criteo rejected the catalogue. Account currency EUR. The burst window is the trailing 72 hours.| Campaign | Spend last 72h (€) | Conversions | Conv. rate | Active SKUs in feed | State |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dynamic retargeting, full catalogue | 2,840 | 0 | 0% | 0 (feed rejected) | BREACH |
| Dynamic retargeting, basket abandoners | 1,610 | 1 | near-zero | 0 (feed rejected) | BREACH |
| Sponsored product, priority SKUs | 420 | 14 | healthy | 380 (separate feed) | OK |
- Two campaigns breached, one did not, and the survivor uses a separate feed. That single fact localises the fault: it is not an account-wide bidding problem, it is the shared catalogue feed that the two dynamic campaigns depend on. The sponsored-product campaign reads a different priority-SKU feed and is unaffected.
- Active SKU count went to zero. This is the smoking gun. When the active-SKU count collapses, dynamic creative has nothing to render and falls back to generic, which costs the same per click but converts at near zero. Spend held because the auto-bidder is still pacing against budget.
- The basket-abandoner campaign got one stray conversion. That is residual lagged credit from before the feed broke, not evidence the campaign is fine. Do not let a single trailing conversion talk you out of the diagnosis.
- The 72-hour burst is roughly EUR 4,450 of pure waste. Left until month-end this would be a multi-thousand-euro hole in the report with no explanation. The burst card surfaces it on day one, while the fix (republish the feed with the corrected price mapping) is a few hours of work.
- First and only real action is the feed. Open Criteo Feed Manager Diagnostics, find the rejection reason (here, a price-field mapping error), fix it on the storefront feed export, force a re-sync, and confirm the active-SKU count recovers. Conversion rate returns within 24 to 72 hours as dynamic creative starts rendering real products again.
- Burst on dynamic campaigns + active SKU count dropped = feed failure, fix the feed.
- Burst on one campaign only, others fine = isolate to that campaign’s feed or audience.
- Burst on an iOS-heavy campaign with healthy feed = possible attribution false positive, check the store ledger before pausing.
- Burst that clears after a feed re-sync = confirmed feed-driven, no pause needed.
- Burst with a healthy feed and stable attribution = genuine creative or audience failure, then consider pausing.
Sibling cards merchants should reference together
| Card | Why it matters next to Wasted-Spend Burst | What the combination tells you |
|---|---|---|
| Wasted Spend | The slow trailing-30-day audit counterpart. | This burst card catches the acute event; Wasted Spend catches the chronic drift. Use them together to separate a sudden feed break from a steady audience-match decline. |
| Zero-Conversion Spend | The underlying metric this burst is built on. | The burst is a short-window, per-campaign cut of zero-conversion spend; the parent card shows the account-wide picture. |
| Spend on Campaigns with Active Feed Rejections | The cross-channel root-cause card. | If both fire, the burst is confirmed feed-driven and you have the exact rejecting catalogue named. |
| Conversion Rate Trend | The conversion-side symptom. | A conversion-rate cliff on the same campaign corroborates a generic-fallback creative failure. |
| Spend by Campaign | The per-campaign spend breakdown. | Confirms which campaigns kept pacing through the burst and how much budget was at risk. |
| Total Spend | The account-level denominator. | Sizes the burst against total spend to judge how material the waste is. |
Reconciling against Criteo
Where to look in Criteo’s own dashboard:Criteo Management Centre → Reporting → Performance Report, grouped by campaign and by day, filtered to dynamic campaign types, then read “Spend” against “Conversions” for the burst window. Cross-reference Criteo Feed Manager → Diagnostics for the catalogue status.The Performance Report shows the raw spend and conversion columns this card combines into a burst signal; Criteo does not surface a same-named 72-hour burst alert natively. To reconcile, sum the dynamic-campaign spend with zero conversions over the burst window in the Custom Report grouped by day, it should match this card within rounding. The decisive corroboration is in Feed Manager Diagnostics: a rejection reason and a collapsed active-SKU count there explains the burst directly. Why our number may legitimately differ from Criteo itself: A small gap is normal.
| Reason | Direction | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Time zone | Boundary days off | Criteo reports in advertiser-account time zone; Vortex IQ uses UTC for the window boundary, which can shift a 72-hour burst by a few hours of spend. |
| Ingest lag | Ours lower for the latest hours | Criteo Management API has a 2 to 4 hour lag; the most recent burst spend is incomplete until catchup. |
| Lagged attribution | Ours marginally higher at first | Post-view credit can land after the burst window, slightly reducing the confirmed zero-conversion figure on later reconcile. |
| Campaign-type filter | Theirs higher if unfiltered | This card targets dynamic campaigns; an unfiltered Performance Report blends in sponsored-product and prospecting spend. |
| Currency | None expected | Both views use advertiser currency. |
| Card | Expected relationship | What causes legitimate divergence |
|---|---|---|
shopify.total_revenue / bigcommerce.total_revenue | If the burst is a true feed failure, store-realised revenue from Criteo-driven sessions should dip in step; if store revenue held, suspect an attribution false positive instead. | Criteo over-attributes generously, so use the store ledger as the tie-breaker on whether the burst is real waste or measurement loss. |
| Spend on Campaigns with Active Feed Rejections | The feed-rejection cross-channel card should name the same catalogue if the burst is feed-driven. | A burst with no active feed rejection points at an audience or creative cause rather than a feed one. |