When you are about to get started with native advertising, Taboola is the first platform that comes to mind – it is the most popular native advertising platform that continues to grow rapidly. It can be found on all the lists of the best native ad networks, and you may have noticed its widely spread ads on your favorite websites.

Its popularity is certainly understandable: with 13.96% of the market share, Taboola ads reach more than 1.4 billion unique users per month. By partnering with the world’s leading publishers such as NBC News, Daily Mail, The Weather Channel, EuroSport, and others, Taboola generates high-quality traffic to advertisers’ websites.

We put together the beginner’s guide to setting up the first Taboola campaign for those who found all the benefits of Taboola attractive enough and finally decided to start with native ads on this platform.

What is Taboola

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

Here are some interesting statistics on Taboola:

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

How it works

In the years since its founding in 2007, Taboola has grown into one of the leading providers of sponsored content on popular websites.

The native advertising process in Taboola is simple and straightforward:

• Advertisers create content, specify the amounts they are willing to pay per click, define the type of audience they want to reach, and wait for their native ads to drive traffic to their landing pages.
• Publishers place a Taboola widget on their site and get paid to display paid content.
• Taboola’s interface connects advertisers and publishers, ensures ads are well crafted, and makes it easy to market.

How to create your first campaign on Taboola

Once you enter your details in the Taboola registration form, you will automatically be directed to the process of creating your first campaign.

Select the right content

What type of content are you going to promote? Is it informative, entertaining, or educational? Is it a blog post, video, or photo gallery? Why do you think it could be attractive to your target audience?

These are the questions you need to answer before you begin. Like any other marketing method, native advertising is effective only when the advertised product has some value to the audience.

You may also want to take a look at the graph showing the difference in performance of content types:

You can see that the visual content generates the highest CTRs. The fact to take into account for your next campaign, right?

Ad content

Unlike Yahoo Gemini, where you must add creative assets in the last stage of campaign creation, Taboola offers you to enter branding text, title, destination URL, and add images in the first step.

Whether or not native advertising will be effective for you depends largely on the appearance of your ad. If you can capture your audience’s attention, you are halfway to success.

Title

You have a maximum of 60 characters to communicate the main idea of ​​the content you promote and convince users that this is the content they want to see right now.

Use powerful words. There are words that help writers impress their audience, excite them, or encourage them to keep reading. These words can include emotional trigger words, such as happy, amazing, abusive, anxious, awesome, etc.

Numbers and statistics. These aren’t exactly words, but they will definitely help you increase your persuasiveness.

Be precise. Compare the following two titles: “How to Move Up the Corporate Ladder” and “Amazon CMO Shares Tips for Building a Successful Career” which would you rather click?

Thumbnail

The image is the first thing users see. Use eye-catching, high-quality thumbnails to get noticed.

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

For best results, we recommend that you try many different combinations of titles and thumbnails in your campaigns.

Marketing objective

Next, you need to define the objective of your campaign. There are five options you can choose from:

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

Your KPIs will largely depend on the decision you make at this stage.

Targeting

While you’re only creating your first campaign, you have two targeting options: by country and by device type. But once you complete the sign-up procedure (after entering your billing details), you will be provided with more advanced targeting options, including targeting based on the operating system or targeting based on a variety of audience types: Clicks, My Audiences, Lookalike Audiences, and Market Audiences.

With the Campaign Clickers option, you can retarget people who have clicked on your ads from other campaigns within a specific time frame.

My Audiences – This targeting option allows you to retarget your website visitors after setting up the Taboola pixel.

Similar targeting can be used to broaden your reach and target new people who are likely interested in your business because they look like your customers.

Marketplace Audiences offers audience targeting options based on audience interests, behavior, demographics, and purchase intent.

A few things to consider:

• Even though you might think you know your audience inside out, get ready to keep testing. In 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.
• Mind that when you select audiences from several audience types at once, you’ll limit your reach significantly.

Campaign scheduling

Like other native ad networks, Taboola allows you to select the period of time you want your campaign to be active. Alternatively, you can specify when you don’t want your ads to show.

Of course, the ideal time for orientation depends mainly on your location. In this graph presented by Taboola, you can see how user behavior differs based on the day of the week:

Bidding strategy & budget

Taboola offers two main bidding strategies: Fixed Bidding and Smart Bidding. While you are more likely familiar with the first strategy, let’s see how the Smart Bidding strategy works.

Smart Bid is the bidding strategy that allows you to maximize conversions based on your marketing objective. Once you decide your referral campaign bid, Smart Bid optimizes bids using historical data to assess the likelihood that specific impressions will capture conversions. If you take advantage of the smart bidding strategy, the platform will continue to A / B testing and compare the automatic bidding strategy with the fixed bidding strategy in real time. The smart offer will only be used if it exceeds the fixed offer.

You must also define the spending limit per month or set the budget for the entire duration of your campaign.

A more important step is to decide the pace of the entire campaign. You can go for a balanced pace recommended for most advertisers, which means that Taboola will run your campaign evenly throughout the month. By selecting Fast Pace, your campaign will get in the way of spending your budget as quickly as possible. With Strict Pacing, you will need to specify the minimum amount that you are willing to spend per day. Remember that your actual daily expense can be twice the amount you entered. If you don’t want to spend your entire monthly budget in a couple of days, we recommend that you indicate your daily budget.

Monitor your campaign & optimize its performance

After launching your first campaign, Taboola reports will provide you with various types of performance reports that you can filter by specific criteria. Each of the following reports will provide you with a different view of your 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 the Taboola Pixel, follow Taboola’s instructions. If you choose to measure your campaign performance with Google Analytics, don’t forget to create and add the appropriate UTM parameters.

Want more informative reports on Taboola campaign performance? With Native Pro, you get access to detailed reporting dashboards, manage your Taboola and Outbrain performance data from one interface, receive performance alerts, and more. Book a free demo to learn how to get the most out of your native ads with Native Pro.

Conclusion

All advertising methods require measuring performance to optimize your campaigns for higher ROI. Native advertising is no exception. To improve your performance and create a successful native ad campaign, you’ll need to spend time developing your creatives, fine-tune your CPC controls, use different targeting options, and never stop testing.

Source from : https://joinative.com/step-by-step-guide-taboola-native-advertising