Digital marketing vendor Criteo S.A. and its retail clients are making a sharp shift to adjust to consumers’ increasingly going online on mobile devices.
Roughly 64% of Criteo’s revenue stemmed from mobile ads it placed for clients during the fourth quarter, a marked seven percentage point jump from the third quarter and a 14 percentage point increase from the same revenue stream in the second quarter.
Criteo aims to capitalize on retailers’ eagerness to target consumers as they move among devices while they shop online. The vendor does so with its universal match technology that attempts to stitch together consumer profiles across devices using anonymized customer-relationship management IDs that are pooled together within Criteo’s system.
The ability to see users across devices is one of the biggest problems retailers face, said CEO Eric Eichmann Wednesday during a conference call with analysts, noting that “more than 40% of e-commerce sales are happening across devices.”
Roughly 60% of the vendor’s revenue—excluding traffic acquisition costs—relied on its universal match technology, the vendor says. That’s up eight percentage points from the third quarter. The technology enables Criteo to identify when a consumer logs into one device with one retail advertiser and on another device with another retail advertiser as long as the CRM ID is the same.
Criteo also completed its acquisition of HookLogic Inc., which it now markets as Criteo Sponsored Products. The technology places targeted ads on the websites of such retailers as Wal-Mart Stores Inc., No. 4 in the Internet Retailer 2016 Top 500 Guide, and Target Corp. (No. 22).
For the fourth quarter ended Dec. 31, Criteo reported:
- Revenue of $566.8 million, up 42.8% from $397.0 million during the same period last year.
- Net income of $38.9 million, down 4.4% from $40.7 million.
- 14,468clients, up 41.9% from 10,198a year earlier.
For the full year, Criteo reported:
- Revenue of $1.799 billion, up 36.0% from $1.323 billion during the same period last year.
- Net income of $87.3 million, up 40.1% from $62.3 million.