Criteo
agency account.

What a Criteo agency account actually gets you.

Criteo is a commerce media platform, which is a different animal to the native networks most people arrive here looking for. Rather than putting an advertorial in front of someone reading the news, Criteo works from shopping signals, so its strongest placements are in front of people who have already visited a product page, abandoned a basket, or browsed something close enough to what you sell that the intent is real. That inventory sits across retailer sites and a wide publisher network, and the ads are usually product led rather than story led.

What that means in practice is that Criteo rewards a different setup to Taboola or MediaGo. You want a working site with traffic, a tag in place, and ideally a product feed, because the dynamic formats are where the platform earns its reputation. If you are running a single advertorial to cold traffic with no catalogue behind it, you will get more out of a native network, and we would rather say that before you pay than after.

The account side is the same story as everywhere else. Getting taken seriously as a new advertiser is slow, support is thin until you are spending properly, and approvals stall without much explanation. An agency account starts you inside an established relationship instead, with your URL reviewed up front and somebody to escalate to when the platform does something you cannot explain.

Who Criteo suits, and who it does not

Criteo suits ecommerce and retail advertisers who already have traffic to work with, because retargeting needs an audience to retarget. If you are selling products with a catalogue, running seasonal offers, or trying to recover abandoned baskets, this is the platform built for exactly that. If you are pushing a cold traffic funnel with no existing visitors and no product feed, the machine has very little to work with, and a native network will almost certainly serve you better.

URL pre-approval happens before you pay

Your destination URL and your website both go through review before the account is opened, and that review is not a formality. Compliance matters here, so the page a reviewer opens has to be the page a real visitor lands on, with no cloaking and no switching. Casino, crypto, adult, counterfeit and anything unlawful are refused outright. Weight loss, supplements and health products can run, but they need pre-approval first and cannot carry exaggerated or unsupported claims.

The three day rule, which catches people out

Criteo accounts are expected to start spending within three days of being handed over, and an account left sitting unused can be closed at the end of that window. This is worth planning around rather than discovering afterwards. Have your creative ready, your tag live and your budget in place before you order, so the account goes to work as soon as it arrives rather than waiting on something at your end.

What happens to your money

Topups are added on demand from the dashboard in USDT, and the fee is shown before you commit so nothing is discovered later. If an account is suspended, the unused balance sitting in it is refunded. The account setup fee itself is not refundable once the account has been bought, and that is worth being clear about up front rather than buried in terms, because it is the one part people are most likely to assume works differently.