Criteo pricing — you are not buying a licence, you are buying media with a fee inside it

One published sentence, and it is the useful one

The obvious URL returns nothing — criteo.com/pricing was a 404 when we checked on 20 August 2026. But the advertiser solutions page carries a single line that tells you more than most rate cards would: "Our solution pricing is IO based, supporting both CPC or CPM pricing." The primary call to action is Contact Sales, with a self-service route branded Criteo GO available in some markets. No tiers, no minimum, no percentage is disclosed anywhere on the page.

That sentence deserves unpacking, because it describes a fundamentally different purchase from the ones on neighbouring pages. Skai and Pacvue and Quartile sell you software; the fee is a line you can see and the media is your money spent elsewhere. An insertion-order model merges the two. You commit a budget, you are billed per click or per thousand impressions, and the platform's margin is taken out of that budget before the media is bought. There is no invoice line called "fee" unless you negotiate one.

The three-letter disambiguation, since this page sits in demand-side platform territory: DSP means demand-side platform — programmatic buying software. It is not Amazon's Delivery Service Partner programme, which franchises parcel delivery. This page is written by Dr. DSP, an Amazon demand-side platform product from Full Circle, a full-service Amazon management company with more than $500M in managed revenue across 100+ brands.

First establish which side of the marketplace you are on

Criteo runs a two-sided business, and "Criteo pricing" means two unrelated things depending on where you stand. People search this term from both sides and read answers meant for the other one.

• If you are a brand buying media, you are an advertiser. The relevant products are the performance and retail media lines, giving access to what Criteo describes as 200+ retailers and 1300+ direct publisher partners, priced on an insertion order at CPC or CPM.
• If you are a retailer monetising your own site, you are a supply partner. Criteo operates your retail media network and takes a share of the revenue it generates for you. That is a revenue-share negotiation, not a media buy, and none of the advertiser guidance applies.
• If you are an agency, you may be both, and the two contracts should be read by different people.

Establishing this first sounds obvious and routinely is not. We have watched a brand-side team spend two calls discussing a commercial model that belonged to the retailer contract. Say which side you are on in the first sentence of the first email.

The number to ask for is the take rate, and it is fair to ask

In an IO-based model the only question that matters commercially is what proportion of your committed budget reaches the auction. That is the take rate, and it is an entirely reasonable thing to request in writing.

Ask it precisely, because vague versions get vague answers:

• Of one hundred dollars committed, how many dollars are spent on inventory? One sentence, one number, in the contract or an appendix to it.
• Is the rate flat or does it vary by placement, format or retailer? Onsite retail media and offsite display frequently carry different economics.
• Are data, audience and measurement fees inside that number or additional? This is where most of the surprise lives across the whole programmatic category.
• Does the rate change with committed volume? If yes, get the thresholds; if no, get that in writing too.
• Who reports delivery? If the platform reports both the spend and the outcome, ask what independent record exists.

Why press this hard: at meaningful budgets, a single undisclosed percentage point is a real annual sum, and it is invisible in every performance report you will ever be shown. A vendor confident in its value will tell you its margin. Many will, once asked directly and in writing.

Criteo's own educational material on CPC versus CPM is worth reading before that call, because the choice interacts with the fee. A CPM buy transfers click-through risk to you; a CPC buy transfers it to the platform and is priced accordingly. Neither is better. Knowing which risk you are buying is the point.

Self-service and managed are different products with the same logo

Criteo offers a self-service route — Criteo GO, available in some markets — alongside campaigns run through its sales and account teams. The difference is not cosmetic and it changes the economics.

Self-service means you own the trading decisions, the pacing and the creative rotation. There is no service layer to pay for and no service layer to lean on. It suits teams with programmatic experience and a real weekly cadence, and it punishes teams who set a campaign live and check it monthly.

Managed means a team executes and advises, and the cost of that team is somewhere in the arrangement — inside the take rate, in a separate fee, or in a minimum commitment. Ask which. "Managed service included" is one of the most expensive phrases in advertising when nobody asks what it is included in.

Either way, insist on the same three artefacts you should demand from any media partner: a written account structure before anything is built, a change log showing every adjustment with its reason, and a defined measurement window agreed before budget moves. Those cost nothing and they are the difference between a partner and a black box.

One piece of context worth knowing before a multi-year commitment

This is offered neutrally, as commercial context rather than commentary on the product. In July 2026, Reuters and Bloomberg both reported that Vista Equity Partners and Quinti Capital had submitted an offer for Criteo at a premium of more than 50 percent to its recent share price; US-listed shares closed at $23.17 on 6 July, giving a market value of roughly $1.16 billion. Reporting was sourced to people familiar with the matter. None of the parties confirmed terms, Criteo had not decided how to respond, and any completed transaction would require shareholder approval. Separately, Digiday reported in August 2024 that Criteo had held M&A discussions with Skai; no deal was announced there either.

The buyer-side lesson is not "avoid" — it is read your change-of-control clause. Ad tech consolidates constantly, and every vendor on your shortlist has some version of this risk. What a sensible buyer does is ask for three things in any multi-year agreement: the right to terminate without penalty on a change of control, a price-protection period that survives an ownership change, and a data-portability commitment that lets you export your campaign history in a usable format. Ask for all three of every vendor, including us. The ones who agree easily are telling you something.

Where an Amazon-first brand should be looking, and what we charge

Criteo is genuinely strong at something we do not attempt: reach across many retailers and a very large open-web publisher footprint, onsite and offsite, in one commercial relationship. If your business runs across grocery, mass, specialty and your own site, and you want one partner covering all of it, that breadth is the reason to buy and no Amazon specialist can match it. Buy Criteo for that.

If Amazon is where the revenue actually is, the calculus changes, because the signal you most want — what a shopper searched, viewed, bought and did not buy on Amazon — lives inside Amazon, and the place it reconciles with your display buying is Amazon Marketing Cloud. That matters because last-click attribution cannot prove incrementality, and display is where the gap between reported and real is widest. The answer is a holdout: withhold display from a matched set of regions or ASINs, run it for a defined window, and reconcile the clean-room data so that display and search stop each claiming the same order. Amazon makes AMC available free to eligible advertisers.

Dr. DSP does that as a managed product. No published price — a demo, the first 30 days free, priced on the call against real media budget and scope, month to month, Orbit included at no extra cost. You set the autonomy level and move it whenever you like; inventory risk, pricing, new products, new creative and stopping display spend always come to a human. As a reference point rather than a promise: across 30 advertisers in July 2026, the pull showed 6.04x return on ad spend, 78.4 million impressions at a $4.00 CPM, a blended $1.42 cost per click and 20.1% new-to-brand.

Two honest redirects. If your Amazon problem is search rather than display, Dr. PPC is the right product and it publishes its price and its cap. If you want this bought as an agency engagement across more than Amazon, with a named team and a scope of work, reMKTR is the door.