Bidding to put your brand in front of the eyes of shoppers who are already looking for you is crucial to maximizing the success of an ad campaign. With the right keyword bidding strategy, businesses can ensure that their ads are seen by people who are the most likely to be interested in your products, easily track their ads’ performance, and continuously improve their campaigns to optimize their return on investment.
Criteo recently announced the release of keyword bidding within their Retail Media Platform. Let’s take a look at how exactly keyword bidding works in action. We spoke to Toby Wilse, Senior Director of Media at Flywheel, about how their recent campaign with Criteo generated powerful results.
What opportunity did Flywheel see when deciding to implement keyword bidding?
As a strategic API partner of Criteo and beta partner for the keyword bidding and targeting release, Flywheel had the opportunity to truly see how impactful this new feature is for both brands and retailers.
Flywheel’s client, a large CPG manufacturer of cleaning products, was historically placing their ads in the middle of the search results page. By partnering with Criteo, Flywheel wanted to help the brand achieve an above the fold (ATF) position with SKUs.
How does keyword bidding on Criteo’s Retail Media Platform work?
The tool complements Criteo’s current targeting capabilities by allowing advertisers to “positively” target keywords and then bid against those keywords on a more granular level. Advertisers now have three different ways to bid through Criteo’s extensive retail media ecosystem to meet brand goals and optimize their ad dollars: keyword bidding, SKU bidding, and line item bidding.
Brands and agencies can also finetune their bidding strategy by choosing precisely how much to bid on specific keywords (branded terms or highly competitive category terms) while maintaining the flexibility of their chosen optimizers.
Keyword bidding allowed the Flywheel team to be much more precise with their keyword strategy and enabled greater control to ensure media dollars are working harder for each unique placement. In order to help the CPG client meet their business goals, Flywheel leveraged the keyword bidding to add override bids on high velocity category terms that were important to the brand.
How does keyword bidding drive success amongst competitors?
After adding override bids on the key terms, the CPG brand (Brand A) began to appear above the fold (ATF) almost immediately. The resulting visibility drove an average of 57% ATF share of voice on “toilet bowl cleaner” over three weeks post execution, a +73% period-over-period increase.
Functionally, Criteo’s keyword bidding tool has been instrumental in driving visibility on must-win, priority terms for our clients. We have been able to effectively leverage this new capability to elevate our SKUs top of search (where we were previously middle of the page) without seeing significant CPC fluctuations. Flywheel has already seen increases in share of search across clients, and we’re excited to continue to lean into this new toolset and further incorporate it into future media strategies across Criteo’s retailer network.
Ready to put your ads in front of your next biggest customers? Learn more about keyword bidding on Criteo’s Retail Media Platform and talk to an expert.
