Criteo has started delivering personalised advertising within mobile apps, a big shift for the $2bn technology group that built its business on targeting ads within web browsers on desktops.
The Nasdaq-listed company is one of many ad tech groups rushing to bring techniques that are common on the web to the nascent but fast-growing market for targeted, real-time advertising in apps.
“If you’re one of our customers, you need to be able to sell your products through mobile devices. That’s suddenly moved from sort of interesting to really important in the last 12 months,” said Jonathan Wolf, chief product officer at Criteo.
“You’re also seeing the dominance of the web browser be really shaken up. You’re moving to an environment where the browser is still important, you can’t ignore it, but the majority of time is being spent in apps.”
According to Flurry, the mobile analytics company, the US consumer spends an average of almost three hours a day on smartphones and tablets, with 80 per cent of that time inside apps and just 20 per cent on the mobile web.
Since Criteo went public in October, investors have worried that the company will struggle to adapt as consumers shift from desktops to mobile devices. This is because the company relies on small files known as cookies to target ads at people browsing the web on desktop computers, but mobile web browsers handle cookies in different ways and mobile apps do not include cookies at all.
To target ads in mobile apps, Criteo is using so-called advertiser IDs provided by Apple and Google. These are strings of numbers that allow ad tracking and targeting within a framework designed to protect user privacy.
Mr Wolf said Criteo’s new technology was designed for advertisers that want to target customers who have already installed their apps but may not have been using them as much as desired.
Dafiti, a Rocket Internet-backed fashion commerce site based in Brazil, is one of the first companies to start using the product, which was built on the back of Criteo’s acquisition of a company called AD-X Tracking last July.
Mobile users will be shown personalised ads that “deep link” from one app, for instance the weather app pictured above, to a specific product page within the advertiser’s own app. Each advert is unique, showing products designed to match the interests of the particular user.
This represents a higher level of sophistication than most in-app advertising, which tends to be targeted with less precision and used to drive the installations of new apps, rather than “deep linking” to pages in ones that have already been downloaded.
“This is about how can we reactivate and reengage users who have downloaded an app,” said Mr Wolf.
If you’re someone who downloads a lot of apps then forgets about them, you are the prime target. One of the advertising world’s biggest retargeting companies is now ready to coax you back.