When you are just about to start with native advertising, Taboola is the most popular native advertising platform that keeps growing rapidly. It can be found in every list of the best native ad networks, and you may have noticed its widespread advertising on your favorite websites.

Its popularity is of course understandable. Taboola’s ads have a market share of 13.96%, and monthly independent users exceed 1.4 billion. Taboola cooperates with the world’s top publishers such as NBC News, Daily Mail, The Weather Channel, EuroSport, etc.

We prepared the beginner’s guide to setting up the first Taboola campaign for those who found all the benefits of Taboola.

What is Taboola

Taboola is the world’s most popular content discovery & native advertising platform for publishers and advertisers. Its native ads appear in customizable widgets within the feed, or appear at the bottom, top, or side of blog posts.

Here are some nice-to-know statistics about Taboola:

• 56% of websites that use content curation technologies advertise with Taboola.
• 1,783 websites from the world’s top 10K websites by traffic are Taboola’s customers.
• Taboola works with more than 10,000 premium publishers and brands.
• Taboola’s native ads reach 44.5% of the world’s Internet population.

How it works

Since established in 2007, Taboola has become one of the main providers of sponsored content on popular websites.

Taboola’s native advertising process is simple and straightforward:

• Advertisers create content, specify the sums they’re ready to pay per click, define the type of audience they want to reach, and wait for their native ads to bring traffic to their landing pages.
• Publishers put a Taboola widget on their site and get paid for displaying paid content.
• Taboola’s interface connects advertisers and publishers, ensures ads are well-crafted and facilitates the functioning of the marketplace.

How to create your first campaign on Taboola

After entering data in Taboola’s signup form, you will be automatically directed to the process of creating your first campaign.

Select the right content

What type of content do you want to promote? Is it informative, entertaining, or educational? Is it a blog post, video, or photo gallery? Why do you think it might appeal to your target audience?

These are the questions you should answer before you start. Like any other marketing method, native advertising is effective only when the advertised product has some value for the audience. You might also want to have a look at the chart that displays the difference in content types’ performance:

You can see that visual content results in the highest click-through rate.

Ad content

Unlike Yahoo Gemini, you should add creative assets in the final stage of campaign creation. Taboola allows you to enter branding text, title, target URL, and add images on the first step.

Whether native ads are effective for you depends largely on the appearance of your ads. If you manage to get the attention of the audience, you are halfway to success.

Title

You can use up to 60 characters to convey the main idea of the content you are promoting and convince users that this is the content they want to view now.

Use power words. Some words can help the writers impress their audience, excite them, or encourage them to continue reading. These words might include emotional trigger words, such as joyful, astonishing, abusive, anxious, mind-blowing, etc.

Numbers & statistics. These are not exactly words, but they will definitely help you improve your persuasive power.

Be precise. Compare the following two titles: ‘How to climb the corporate ladder’ and ‘Amazon CMO shares tips to build a successful career,’ which one would you prefer to click on?

Thumbnail

The image is the first thing the user sees. Use high-quality and eye-catching thumbnails to get attention.

PRO TIP: Taboola provides insights on the most successful elements of native ads based on your product or service category, target language, country, and platform.

For better results, we recommend that you test a lot of different combinations of headlines and thumbnails combinations in your campaign.

Master Advertising On Taboola

Register for the ultimate native advertising course and get exclusive insights into building successful Taboola campaigns.

Marketing objective

Next, you need to define your campaign goals. There are five options you can choose:

• Lead Generation
• Online Purchases
• Brand Awareness
• Web Engagement
• Mobile App Installs

Your KPIs will highly depend on the decisions you make at this stage.

Targeting

Although you’re only creating your first campaign, you have two targeting options: by country and by device type. However, once you complete the registration process (after you enter your billing details), you’ll be provided with more advanced targeting options, including targeting based on the operating system or targeting based on a various types of audiences: Campaign Clickers, My Audiences, Lookalike Audiences, and Marketplace Audiences.

By using the Campaign Clickers option, you can retarget people who have clicked on your ads from other campaigns within a certain timeframe.

My Audiences – this targeting option allows you to retarget your website visitors after you set up Taboola pixel.

Lookalike targeting can be used to expand your reach and target new people likely to be interested in your business because they are similar to your customers.

Marketplace Audiences provides audience targeting options based on the audience’s interests, behavior, demographics, and purchase intent.

A few things to consider:

• Even though you might think you know your audience completely, be prepared to continue testing. After a week, you might be surprised by the demographics of users who responded to your ads.
• Split your campaigns by audience segments to adjust campaign settings (e.g. CPC, creatives, etc.) for every segment.
• Please be aware that when you select audiences from several audience types at once, you will significantly limit your reach.

Campaign scheduling

Like other native ads networks, Taboola allows you to choose the time frame you want your campaign to be live. Alternatively, you can specify when you don’t want your ads to be displayed.

Of course, the ideal targeting time mainly depends on your location. In this chart provided by Taboola, you see how users’ behavior differs depending on the day of the week:

Bidding strategy & budget

Taboola offers two main bidding strategies: Fixed Bid and Smart Bid. Although you are most likely to be familiar with the first strategy, let’s take a look into how the Smart Bid strategy works.

Smart Bid is the bidding strategy that allows you maximize conversions based on your marketing goals. Once you decide on your baseline campaign bid, Smart bid optimizes bids using historic data to evaluate how likely specific impressions are to capture conversions. If you leverage Smart Bid strategy, the platform will keep A/B testing and comparing the automated bidding strategy with the fixed bidding strategy in real time. Smart Bid will only be utilized if it outperforms Fixed Bid. You should also either define the spending limit on a per month basis or set the budget for the entire duration of your campaign.

The more important step is deciding on the pace of the whole campaign. You can go with a recommended for most advertisers Balanced Pacing that means Taboola will run your campaign evenly throughout the month. If you select Accelerated Pacing, your campaign will pace in the way for your budget to be spent as quickly as possible. With Strict Pacing, you’ll need to specify the minimum amount you want to spend per day. Remember that the actual daily spend can be twice as much as the sum you entered.

Monitor your campaign & optimize its performance

After you start your first campaign, Taboola’s reports will provide you with multiple types of performance reports, which can be filtered by specific criteria. Each of the following reports will provide you with a different view of campaign information:

• Viewing data by time
• Viewing data by location
• Viewing data by platform
• Viewing data by campaign item
• Viewing data by hour or day, etc.

For any report, you’ll see the following metrics:

• Impressions
• Viewable impressions (tracked each time your ad is on the screen for at least 1 second)
• CTR
• Viewable CTR
• Clicks
• Average CPC
• CPM (cost per one thousand impressions)
• Viewable CPM
• Conversion rate
• Conversions
• CPA
• Views
• Completed views (for videos)

To set up accurate conversion tracking and set up Taboola Pixel, follow Taboola’s instructions. If you opt for measuring your campaign performance with Google Analytics, don’t forget to create and add proper UTM parameters.

What is the next step?

Every advertising method requires measuring performance in order to optimize your campaigns toward higher ROI. Native advertising is not an exception. To improve your performance and build a successful native advertising campaign, you’ll need to spend time developing your creatives, adjusting your CPC controls, using different targeting options, and never stop testing.