It’s been one year since Criteo went public and the overall growth experienced by the company last quarter is holding steady.
The French retargeting firm announced a 71.9% year-over-year uptick in revenue in Q3 2014 to roughly $243 million. (Full earnings release.)
Part of that sustained growth is thanks to Criteo’s expanding client base, which increased by 450 during the third quarter to 6,581. Key customer wins in the Americas include Travelocity and Carrentals.com. Criteo also added new relationships to its publisher base, bringing the total to more than 8,000 direct publisher relationships.
Although Criteo saw marked YoY growth in global revenue – 51% in EMEA and 70% in the Asia-Pacific region – growth in the Americas was particularly explosive, up 97% in Q3 2014 versus Q3 2013 to nearly $29 million. Criteo CEO and co-founder Jean-Baptiste Rudelle attributes the increase, at least in part, to continued roll-outs of new tech and products, as well as Criteo’s “obsession with performance.”
“At the end of the day, clients are not looking for 50 different solutions,” Rudelle told AdExchanger about an hour before the company’s Q3 earnings call Tuesday. “They want one mobile turnkey solution.”
Criteo is looking to be that solution. In addition to releasing an enhanced version of its prediction and recommendation tool, the “Criteo Engine,” in June – the engine now includes post-click conversions – Criteo announced the launch of an email-based deterministic cross-device solution in mid-October. The Criteo Engine is now live with more than 78% of Criteo clients, while roughly 74% tapped into Criteo’s multi-screen offering in Q3.
“As we know, we live in a world where a consumer’s attention span is very quickly fragmenting across multiple devices,” Rudelle said. “We believe our ability to find and match users at scale on large, medium and small screens seamlessly is unique in our industry.”
What, then, of Facebook? In answer to one analyst’s question about how Criteo’s new cross-device offering and proprietary identifier stacks up against the competition, including the people-based advertising promised by Facebook’s revamped Atlas ad server, Rudelle demurred, calling the solutions “complementary.” There’s room for more than one player on the scene, he said.
In terms of roadmap, Rudelle said Criteo is already in the process of working on the next generation of the Criteo Engine, which is slated to enable advertisers to provide basket-level shopper data and breakdowns of spending by individual purchase. That version of the engine is currently being beta tested with select clients.
The one raincloud on Criteo’s sunny horizon is the fact that the company still doesn’t have a mobile integration with Facebook. Investors showed their concern about this last quarter, pushing Rudelle for a timeline on when the integration would be complete. This quarter, Rudelle had some progress to report, but didn’t share specific timing, noting that Criteo is “actively working with Facebook on the mobile piece of the inventory and we are confident that we’ll be able to announce progress in the coming quarters.”
