What Makes Criteo’s Engine Hum? Predictive Bidding

Predictive Bidding, part of the Criteo Engine, has the power to place the right bid at the right moment for every combination of products and shoppers.

Updated on November 19, 2025

Criteo’s Engine is a listening, responsive solution that continually learns about your shoppers and their purchasing intentions, enabling you to deliver targeted ads that directly line up with each shopper’s preferences.

The Criteo Engine is made up of three different parts that work together to provide you with the deepest insights and highest return on your marketing investment. Today, we’re focusing on Predictive Bidding, which has the power to place the right bid at the right moment for every combination of products and shoppers. Predictive Bidding is an ace in the pocket for marketers — a secret weapon that helps optimize your advertising spend.

Predictive Bidding analyzes consumer, product, and publisher data to place the right bid at the right time.

Digging Deeper: Product, Consumer, and Publisher Evaluation

The key to Predictive Bidding is its ability to effectively evaluate an array of data, culminating in perfectly timed bids that reduce the cost of each sale. Predictive Bidding includes three key components:

• Product Evaluation: Predictive Bidding takes into account historical details about each shopper and the products they’ve viewed and purchased in the past to inform strong conversion predictions. By leveraging historical shopper browsing information from your site, Predictive Bidding can offer accurate insights about the items that are most likely to spur a conversion.
• Consumer Evaluation: Predictive Bidding bases its insights on Criteo’s network of more than 1.2 billion monthly shoppers and their individual behaviors. This delivers unparalleled accuracy in conversion predictions, and improves the efficiency and effectiveness of your advertising spend. Consumer Evaluation is what enables Predictive Bidding to precisely pinpoint the right bid at the perfect moment.
• Publisher Evaluation: The insights Predictive Bidding leverages also extend to the publishers supporting your ads. Publisher Evaluation takes into account both historical and real-time shopper-product interactions for each publisher. This results in robust insights about the best publisher to leverage for each specific ad, and whether or not you should place a bid for an optimized impression to further target individual shoppers.

Through intelligent assessment of your shoppers, the products they interact with, and the publishers best suited for each ad, Predictive Bidding enables you to lower your cost of sales by placing optimal bids at the precise moment.

What Makes Criteo’s Engine Hum, The Series:

Predictive Bidding

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