A home essentials brand, in partnership with Flywheel, wanted to better understand how their buyers behaved outside of Amazon’s ecosystem. One key question guided this work: could combining Amazon’s rich in‑platform audiences with Criteo’s open‑web shopper graph uncover new reach and incremental performance, rather than forcing a choice between the two?
The challenge: expanding buyer habits beyond the Amazon ecosystem
While Amazon DSP and Amazon Audiences offer a strong foundation for in-platform targeting, the brand and Flywheel were interested in testing how Criteo Commerce Audiences could complement Amazon audiences to extend reach and drive incremental performance across the open web.
The campaign aimed to evaluate the standalone performance of Criteo Commerce Audiences compared to Amazon Audiences, while also exploring the incremental value of combining both audience sets rather than viewing them as competing solutions.
The solution: testing complementary audiences to unlock incremental growth
In collaboration with the Criteo Commerce Grid Team, Flywheel launched a campaign designed to measure this impact.
The campaign included two display curated deals. One leveraged Criteo Commerce Audiences alone, and the other combined Criteo Commerce Audiences with Amazon Audiences. The primary focus was achieving improvements on Detail Page View Rate (DPVR).
Daily reporting was implemented to ensure optimizations could be actioned as soon as performance data was available. This helped to maximize optimization while ensuring alignment between SSP supply setup and DSP inventory parameters.
The results: Criteo Commerce Audiences, a complementary partner to Amazon Audiences
By the end of the competitive test, Flywheel concluded that Criteo Commerce Audiences and Amazon Audiences function best as complementary audience strategies.
The brand saw:
+55% higher DPVR (0.59%) when combining Criteo Commerce Audiences with Amazon Audiences, demonstrating stronger engagement and conversion intent across the open web.
3× increase in purchase volume, proving that Amazon DSP campaigns enriched with Criteo data drive higher shopper intent and post-click conversions.
2.1× broader reach, showing that Criteo’s commerce audiences extended incremental exposure beyond Amazon’s ecosystem and reached new, high-value shoppers.
+52% higher DPV per unique user when using Criteo Commerce Audiences, showing that while combined audiences drove scale, Criteo’s standalone audiences delivered deeper engagement quality per exposed user.
By operating within Amazon DSP while layering in Criteo’s unique shopper graph, the brand and Flywheel gained a clearer understanding of how buyers behave outside of Amazon. Subsequently, those signals can be used to drive incremental reach and influence shopper decisions before they return to Amazon to complete their purchases.
The learnings provide a strong foundation for future cross-platform optimizations, proving that Criteo’s shopper graph can extend the power of Amazon audiences across the open web and drive measurable business outcomes for brands.
Shopper intelligence unlocked deeper buyer understanding
Beyond campaign results, Flywheel went even further by tapping into Amazon and Criteo shopper insights for a more complete view of how shoppers behaved. These complementary insight suites revealed how buyers moved between Amazon’s ecosystem and the open web and which combinations of media exposures produced the strongest results.
Multi-ad exposure drives stronger conversion outcomes
An Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) analysis showed that shoppers exposed to both Amazon onsite Sponsored Ads and Criteo-targeted offsite ads converted at significantly higher rates. The best performance came from shoppers who saw Sponsored Brands + Sponsored Products + Criteo-targeted offsite ads, achieving the highest conversion rate (2.73%).
Criteo-targeted offsite ads played a meaningful role in the shopper journey
Criteo’s product adjacency analysis shows that the brand’s shoppers are highly engaged, cross-category consumers.
They are primarily active homeowners with strong overlap in hardware, home-improvement, and appliance brands, signaling proactive home maintenance and upgrades. They are value-driven yet brand-conscious, shopping both warehouse value brands and premium national brands. They are also multi-purpose shoppers, often purchasing grocery and household staples in the same mission as home-improvement items.
These patterns reinforce why Criteo’s offsite ads influenced shoppers early, with AMC analysis showing that Criteo exposure contributed meaningfully to pre-Amazon research and consideration moments that ultimately drove stronger downstream performance.
Increasing Criteo-targeted offsite ads investment could unlock more new-to-brand buyers (NTB)
AMC insights suggest that scaling Criteo-targeted offsite ads investment may drive additional NTB conversions, reinforcing Criteo’s role in finding new high-value shoppers who eventually return to Amazon to purchase.
Together, Flywheel’s analysis shows that Amazon and Criteo deliver a true full-funnel, cross-platform view of how shoppers discover, evaluate, and ultimately purchase the brand's products. Amazon insights revealed what happens within the shopping and conversion environment, while Criteo illuminated the earlier research and comparison moments happening across the open web.
This dual visibility allowed the brand and Flywheel to build smarter, complementary audience strategies, reaching shoppers sooner, influencing intent more effectively, and understanding not just who converts, but why and how. The results show that shoppers engaged across both ecosystems convert more efficiently, that Criteo’s upstream exposure plays a critical role in priming new-to-brand customers, and that combining insight suites leads to better budget allocation and more confident optimization decisions.
Ultimately, Criteo Commerce Audiences are a complementary partner to Amazon Audiences and Amazon Sponsored Products to unlock a more holistic targeting of buyer behavior and create a stronger, more scalable path to incremental growth.
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