How Criteo unified its B2B platforms and prioritized its product roadmap with Contentsquare

Key metrics

• 4 development sprints freed up per year thanks to Smart Capture, with a drastic reduction in human tracking errors

• Direct improvement in ROI on ad campaign creation journeys

• An optimized product roadmap with unified cross-platform data accessible to all product teams

The company

Criteo, the global leader in Commerce Media, helps advertisers and merchants deliver high-performing full-funnel advertising campaigns thanks to its AI, which collects more than 35 billion events per day related to browsing and purchasing. 

The challenge

Following several acquisitions, Criteo found itself with a variety of analytics tools, tracking plans, and product platforms. 

This fragmentation created 3 major obstacles:

1. A lack of visibility into the user journey: it wasn't easy to track users across different platforms and understand their interactions with Criteo products

2. Frequent errors in tracking plans due to heterogeneous designs and implementations: since each platform had its own system, it was difficult to consolidate data and obtain a coherent overview 

3. A roadmap that was difficult to prioritize: without unified and reliable data, roadmap decisions lacked a solid foundation for moving forward in the right direction

As Global Head of Product Design at Criteo, Sarah Lacroix was hindered by Criteo’s disconnected data.

But she could also see how the product managers, UX designers, product analysts, and developers she supports in creating consistent, high-performance, and data-driven user experiences were struggling to work without a unified source of data.

“We had multiple analytics tools informing business decisions,” she says. “This meant that those decisions were highly dependent on—and limited by—the tracking methods and dashboards that each team could create.”

The solution

To address the challenges caused by fragmented data, Criteo deployed Contentsquare’s experience intelligence platform across its product, design, and tech teams. 

Each team involved in the Proof of Concept phase had a clear objective: to rebuild a reliable, readable, and actionable data foundation at all levels of the organization. 

"We wanted to break down data silos and build a shared foundation that everyone could rely on with complete confidence," says Sarah. “We needed a single source of truth for data that could speak to the entire company, not just by stream, squad, or department.”

Smart Capture makes event tracking easy and error-free

In pursuing its goal of breaking down data silos, one of the key levers identified by the Criteo team was Contentsquare’s Smart Capture capability. 

This technology revolutionizes event tracking by automatically capturing every user interaction (including clicks, scrolls, form fills, and so on) without any need for a tagging plan. 

"Smart Capture is a key feature that saves us valuable time. It eliminates tracking errors and allows us to focus on data analysis rather than tracking configuration."

Sarah Lacroix

Global Head of Product Design

Smart Capture frees Product Managers from the tedious task of writing tracking specifications and enables developers to refocus on higher-value tasks.

For Criteo, this meant freeing up 4 development sprints per year that their teams could now devote to more strategic work.

Detecting and correcting friction in real time via Journey Analysis

When launching a new advertising campaign creation solution, Criteo implemented detailed behavioral tracking to detect friction points early and understand journey abandonment.

Using Contentsquare’s Journey Analysis capability, Criteo's teams are identifying friction points across strategic funnels and continuously adapting the roadmap. This data-driven approach allows them to optimize journeys where optimizations will have the greatest business impact.

"We want to know if things are going smoothly, if users are encountering any roadblocks in the flow. With Journey Analysis, we can identify which customers have been held back, where, and why."

Sarah Lacroix

Global Head of Product Design

By optimizing this strategic flow, the team directly improved conversion in the campaign creation journey, resulting in a measurable increase in revenue generated.

Sarah explains: “ROI is fairly simple to calculate, since Criteo's goal is to create advertising campaigns for advertisers. So improving conversion in the campaign creation flow significantly increases the number of campaigns created and therefore the revenue generated by our platforms.”

The results

Implementing Contentsquare generated concrete and measurable results for Criteo: 

• 4 development sprints freed up per year: Smart Capture eliminated human tracking errors and freed up development time for technical teams

• Direct improvement in ROI: Optimizing the ad campaign creation process resulted in a measurable increase in revenue generated

• A unified product roadmap, with a single source of truth, enabling consistent data-driven decisions for all teams (PMs, analysts, designers, developers)

What's next?

The Criteo team continues to leverage Contentsquare's advanced capabilities to further develop behavioral analysis by:

• Supporting cross-selling and upselling across other Criteo solutions

• Enriching analyses by exporting user cohorts to the research repository and Salesforce for personalized sales support

• Leveraging Contentsquare's Sense AI to accelerate the detection of critical friction points and the necessary corrective actions

"At Criteo, we're looking to move faster, prioritize better, and avoid bad decisions,” says Sarah. “In this regard, Contentsquare is a key partner."

"I often hear B2B companies neglecting product analytics in their solutions. I think this is a mistake because if you don't have the right data, you won't make the right decisions. A solution like Smart Capture helps you avoid these mistakes and make the right decisions. This is definitely something that shouldn't be overlooked because these are mistakes that can potentially be very costly for the business."

Sarah Lacroix

Global Head of Product Design