Focus on mid-market, agencies; Criteo to grow double digit in India, says Siddharth Dabhade

Criteo, with a significant client base in India across all verticals, including Pepperfry, Nykaa, Flipkart, Paytm, Yatra, Tata Cliq, SonyLiv, Zomato among others, is turning its focus on mid-markets and agencies. Having India as one of the strongest markets in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region, the advertising platform is witnessing a double-digit growth in India.

“Last year in India, we grew at 65% YoY. For this year, we will focus on mid-market and agency business. They can double or more in this year,” said Siddharth Dabhade, Managing Director, Criteo India.

Speaking to BestMediaInfo.com on the side-lines of ExecConnect, an event hosted by Criteo in Thailand’s Chiang Mai, Dabhade shared how the platform is expanding in the market, resolving all the marketing challenges.

Focusing more on upper funnel campaigns, he said agencies at that level play a very important role, and thus more attention would be given to agencies and mid-market e-commerce sites having web traffic up to one million users in a month.  The platform is working with agencies such as DAN, iProspect, Group M. The platform was already providing solutions for the websites but now would focus more on mobile applications, given that India has 85% of internet users on mobile phones.

Criteo would go forward with all app-first clients across multiple verticals such as food, tech, classifieds, etc., which Dabhade described as a big change in the positioning of the platform.

The platform recently introduced a full-funnel mobile app solution in India for re-targeting and re-engaging.

Dabhade discussed how marketers are facing the challenge of un-installation of their mobile applications, and after installation, conversion is a big issue. Addressing those issues, the platform came up with new solutions, which can be verified with third-party fraud applications.

“If you do re-engagement and re-targeting, uninstalls come down and you get more conversions. And hence the profitability of your marketing campaign increases. So, we are basically solving the exact problem that advertisers are facing,” he added.

The platform had found a gap in the monetisation of the open internet, and is growing in that space on its own, with no competitors as such, Dabhade said.

He said the recommendation engine of Criteo is very strong and ensures that whenever a consumer clicks on a Criteo ad, 28% of conversions happen for products that the consumer had not seen earlier when he/she had visited the website or the app.

“Our CTR are very high, which means that we are giving relevant and personalised product recommendations to the consumers. We have cross-device capabilities. We have about 1.9 billion shoppers and 1.5 billion map to cross device. So, we are also able to save the cost of advertisers. They don’t have to advertise somewhere or to somebody who's not even interested,” he added.

Talking about how campaigns of advertisers have to have a seamless experience for users, he said, “Ads have to be contextually strong, and relevant, and with creative rightly put, whether it is on retailers’ sites or publishers’.  Few believe that creativity and data cannot go hand in hand. There is a third way, where you can make best use of both. Have the best use of data and the creative assets.”

For this, he said that marketers are already becoming tech savvy, and understanding digital or data has now become a part of their strategy. Along with this, data scientists also have to be all guns blazing.

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