So Halfords is a merchant I promote. A visitor goes to my site, clicks a link to halfords (cookie dropped) and views the product I am promoting.

The visitor then leaves the site (possibly with the intention of buying that product at a later date thus earning me money).

At some point down the line the visitor sees this Criteo advert for Halfords showing the product he/she was looking at and ends up going back to buy it. Do I get the commission? Or is Criteo taking the commission?

They work with loads of retailers now btw, including M&S, Office shoes, Boden. Because of the number of retailers they’ve got on board, they can get some pretty amazing advertising slots (have seen them on 4od, Facebook, Hotmail).

There are obviously ethical implications with behavioural targetting, but I believe that Criteo is doing it right. Non of the info is personally identifiable, only you see it (unless of course you put a screengrab on a blog), and theres an information link on every banner you can opt-out through. And I’d rather see advertising for companies I’m interested in anyway.

Basics of how Critero work. Each product page on merchant site sets a cookie with a product ID, Critero take a product feed with the ID’s and buy media space from wherever. You visit, cookie picks up you’ve visited one of their partners and the product ID and shows you the same / similar products. The clever ones offer a discount if you didn’t purchase in your initial visit to the merchant.

I guess it works on the basis that few people buy what they are looking at first time, so this increase the merchants’ chances of you going back to buy from them.

I posted about it on A4u back in June – there are quite a few replies which explain a little more about it.

http://www.affiliates4u.com/forums/affiliate-marketing-lounge/112519-how-do-they-do.html

http://www.criteo.com/en/solutions/how-does-it-work