This article will review how Taboola works, including how we surface personalized recommendations and how the auction works.
Overview: How Taboola Works
Taboola is the world’s largest content discovery platform. We help publishers boost engagement and monetize their online properties while enabling advertisers and marketers to reach highly engaged audiences in a cost-effective and scalable way. Our personalized recommendations help advertisers grow their traffic and reach potential customers across the world’s most popular websites. This happens at the very moment they are in ‘discovery mode’, consuming content and showing interest in new stories or products.
We recommend content across many of the world’s most top sites, including NBC News, Daily Mail, The Weather Channel, EuroSport, Sankei News, and more.
With Taboola, you’ll get:
Powerful targeting options - Enabling you to target your audience by location, operating system, and the device they are browsing from.
Full control of your campaigns - With the ability to start and pause campaigns, and decide on campaign settings such as cost per click, campaign budget and more.
Comprehensive reporting - With full transparency to help you take the steps you need to grow and scale your campaign, and get a 360-degree look at what’s working best and where you can improve.
The flexibility to set your goals - Including brand awareness, increasing sales, driving conversions and more.
The Taboola Predictive Engine
Taboola is powered by an advanced predictive engine that analyzes hundreds of real-time signals (including geography, context, device, social media trends, and more), in order to create a match between the content and the audience most likely to engage with it.
Our personalized content recommendations are served on top publisher websites, within a customizable widget typically placed on the bottom, top or side of content articles, as well as within the feed.
Taboola’s Auction: How Does it Work?
Taboola is powered by an advanced predictive engine that analyzes hundreds of real-time signals including geography, context, device, and social media trends. This helps to to create a match between campaign items and the audience most likely to engage with them.
Taboola’s personalized campaign item recommendations are served on top publisher websites, within a widget typically placed on the bottom, top or side of articles, as well as within the feed. This article will review how campaign items are placed in these placements.
Campaign Item Placement Considerations
Campaign targeting and publisher acceptance are two major factors that influence where your campaign items are shown.
Campaign targeting - this means that your campaign items will only have the chance to appear where you have set your campaign to target. For example, if you target desktop only in France, your campaign items will only show up there. You can learn more about campaign targeting options here.
Publisher acceptance - this means your campaign items will only have the chance to appear on publishers that accept your type of content. For example, some publishers may not want political advertisements on their website. So, if you are running a political advertisement, your campaign items will not be able to appear on that publisher site. You can learn more about how your campaign items are categorized here.
Keeping Your Campaign Items Competitive
By using real-time signals, Taboola’s predictive engine algorithm constantly adjusts to recommend the most relevant campaign items to users, while also taking advertiser competition into consideration. In addition to the campaign item placement considerations above, the algorithm looks at two important factors to help figure out when to recommend your campaign items - CTR and CPC.
CTR, or clickthrough rate, is an indication of how interested users are in your campaign items. The higher the CTR, the more your campaign items will be recommended to users. You can increase your CTR by following our title and thumbnail best practices.
CPC, or cost per click, is an indication of how much you are willing to pay per click. The higher the CPC, the more competitive your campaign items will be across the network, which means they will be shown more often. If you increase your CPC, you are more likely to get more clicks to your campaign items.
Important note!
You may be bidding a lower CPC than your competition, but it is still possible to have a competitive campaign with a higher CTR. Both of these factors are taken into consideration, and a higher CTR can compensate for a lower CPC and vice versa.