In recent years, content discovery has powered successful marketing campaigns for companies of all sizes, driving a variety of goals throughout the customer funnel for both emerging and established brands, from awareness to consideration to purchase. But launching your first campaign on the world’s largest discovery platform can also involve a learning curve.

Below are a few of the common hurdles marketers may face when first setting up a campaign with Taboola, along with tips for how to correct those missteps and see immediate results.

My Campaign aren’t Receiving Enough Clicks

Taboola operates on a cost-per-click (CPC) model, ensuring that our marketing partners only pay if a user actively chooses to engage with their piece of content. In order to make sure that your campaign is competitive and receives enough initial impressions across the network, it’s important to follow our recommended CPC, make sure your content is safe for all audiences, and begin by targeting a wide range of platforms and geographies so that Taboola’s algorithm can more quickly identify the most relevant places to promote your campaigns.

Compelling headlines and thumbnails are also vital to successfully driving clicks, a lesson that both advertisers or journalists know well. Fortunately, marketers can use Taboola’s A/B testing capabilities to experiment with dozens of different combinations and uncover the most compelling “packaging” for their campaign. (For example, see how Secret Escapes Refinery29 boosted click-through rates by over 28800% with Taboola)

Even after you discover a well-performing combination, ongoing experimentation is crucial to generating new ideas that may work even better (especially as existing creative elements see user fatigue). Check out Taboola’s best practices for headlines and images to learn more about how to optimize your campaign creative for maximum impact.

Users aren’t Engaging with my Content

Encouraging users to click on your promoted item is only part of the battle, as returns-on-investment won’t come until after a user engages with your content and takes action. If your landing pages are seeing high bounce rates, think about whether your campaign creatives accurately reflect the post-click experience, and adjust accordingly if you detect any discrepancy.

It’s also important, early on, to make sure your campaign is using the best format to promote the message you want to get across. For example, research from Taboola and Clicktale found that text resonates more with an audience’s rational, decision-making mentality (relevant for driving lead-generation and sales), while visuals play more towards a viewer’s emotions (boosting brand awareness).

This user-centric philosophy can apply to many other elements of your campaign as well, including page design, ease of navigation, responsivity to different device types, and more.

Users aren’t Converting After They Arrive On-site

Content discovery operates differently than a traditional direct-response campaign. Your landing page must first capture a user’s attention, providing some kind of educational or entertainment value that is directly useful to them. Only after that connection is established can you effectively introduce a “call-to-action” (CTA) for the user, whether it be an email subscription, free trial, or new purchase.

Conversion rates are further affected by the user experience of engaging with a CTA. Such modules need to be prominently placed, simple to act upon, and supported by a compelling and easily-digestible piece of content. Check out our full infographic for more of Taboola’s best practices on creating content pages that convert.

My Cost-Per-Action is Still too High

Once you have a successful campaign up and running, you can worry less about click-through rates (CTR) and instead focus on the quality of each click being generated, according to your key performance metrics (e.g. conversion rates, time-on-site, pages-per-visit). Cost-per-actions (CPAs) vary significantly depending on factors such as country, platform (e.g. desktop, mobile), and publisher, and after analyzing your post-campaign data to see where performance is strongest, you can create new campaigns that focus solely on those most valuable audiences.

To achieve optimal campaign performance, our team also advises our marketing partners to “pre-qualify the click,” ensuring that their headlines aren’t overly broad and encourage only the right audiences to click. Again, this may lower CTRs, but your newly efficient campaigns will allow you to bid higher CPCs overall and better scale across Taboola’s network.

Interested in learning more about how you can drive results with Taboola? Check out our Advertiser Help Center and launch a new campaign today!

Originally Published:

Create Your Content Campaign Today!