Unlocking India’s evolving shopper journey with commerce audiences

Authored By Medhavi Singh, Country Head, Criteo India

The Indian e-commerce market is projected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 21% and reach $ 325 billion in 2030, as per Deloitte’s report. This highlights a growing trend: today’s consumers are more connected than ever, and their shopping journey has become anything but linear. Where once the path from consideration to purchase was a straight line, today it more closely resembles a zig-zag or a circle, with touchpoints scattered across various platforms.

Consumers bounce from spotting a product on Instagram, asking questions about it on Reddit, reading reviews on the open web, and then making the final purchase in-store or online. For marketers, this presents a significant challenge—how can you target consumers when their behavior is unpredictable and multi-faceted?

The answer is Commerce Audiences.

For marketers, reaching the right audience at the right time has always been a priority. Traditional ad platforms have typically focused on user attributes and demographics, building audiences around what they think they know about who a user is. However, relying on an outdated or biased data often leads to missed opportunities and wasted ad spend.

The key to reaching today’s shoppers effectively is precision—being able to connect with consumers based on their behaviors and interests, rather than just static demographics. This is where Commerce Audiences comes into play.

That leads us to the question that what are Commerce Audiences?

Simply put, a Commerce Audience is an audience built with shopper data—whether it’s browsing, buying, or searching. Every interaction a consumer has with a product, whether on an e-commerce platform or across the open web, provides valuable data that can be used to build highly relevant audiences. Commerce Audiences are powered by thousands of signals from millions of real-world shopper journeys, meaning these segments not only target who people are but also what products they’re engaging with.

Unlike traditional audiences, which rely heavily on user attributes like age and location, Commerce Audiences also incorporate product attributes. These attributes help refine targeting by considering what people are buying or browsing, their preferred brands, product categories, and price range.

A deeper dive into Commerce Audiences reveals two key elements:

Product Attributes: This includes insights into what consumers are browsing or buying, the brands they're engaging with, the product categories they’re interested in, and their preferred price range.
Customer Attributes: These encompass geo-location, demographics, purchasing power, and the types of content users consume across the web.

By merging pre-purchase intent signals with post-purchase conversion data, Commerce Audiences enable brands to accurately identify when a customer is primed to buy and deliver the perfect ad at the perfect moment.

The “Built Different” Approach

What sets Commerce Audiences apart? The answer lies in the powerful, data-driven signals that fuel them. These signals provide marketers with privacy-safe, actionable insights into consumer behavior and product preferences.

With a vast network of data, marketers can leverage these insights across various platforms for highly effective campaign activation. Whether through proprietary solutions or third-party DSPs (such as Google DV360, The Trade Desk, etc.), campaigns can be activated with unmatched precision.

Key signals that power Commerce Audiences include:

Product Searches: Insights from millions of searches across 18,000+ ecommerce sites, 225+ retailer partners, and thousands of open web publishers.
Product Views: Data from a catalog of billions of product SKUs, showing what consumers are considering, when, and where.
Purchases: With over $1 trillion in ecommerce transactions processed annually, we have unmatched visibility into purchase behavior across our network.
Ad Interactions: Billions of daily product recommendations reveal which products attract attention, which ad formats are most engaging, and where those interactions take place.
Content Consumption: Data from thousands of open web publishers provides insight into where shoppers spend their time, what they're reading, and what interests them most.

Additionally, marketers can enrich these insights with their own data—such as first-party customer data and point-of-sale information—allowing AI to further refine targeting and find their best customers.

They can also bring their own data into the mix by uploading first-party customer and point-of-sale information, giving our AI even more to work with and helping to broaden your reach through our powerful commerce signals.

With Commerce Audiences, you can say goodbye to the uncertainty of guesswork and hello to smarter, more personalized campaigns that deliver real, impactful results.

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