As a creaky Taboola veteran (six years strong!), I couldn’t be more excited about today’s newest product feature launch, Smart Bid. A mere six years ago, making a simple cost-per-click change in your Taboola campaigns was no easy task; indeed, we promised a 24 hour turn-around for such a request. We (and the Taboola platform) have come a long way since.
Starting today, we have released Smart Bid as the new default Bid Strategy for all new Taboola campaigns.
Smart Bid is a new bidding feature that helps you maximize campaign performance by automatically adjusting the baseline bid of every impression based on the likelihood to drive conversions or page views.
What are the benefits of Smart Bid?
Network Learnings
Smart Bid uses historic network conversion data (publisher data, user data, time of day, platform, etc.) to make automatic bid adjustments for each impression.
Since each month our platform parses over 500 million valuable conversions globally, Smart Bid is able to create very informed decisions aimed at maximizing campaign conversions.
Scale and Efficiency
There are a lot of variables to manage when it comes to maximizing the value of the Taboola platform such as user interest, page context, time of day, geography, device, site, and vertical. Smart Bid makes sure that you can safely maximize your campaign reach without having to narrow down your campaign targeting.
Performance
In Beta, we tested Smart Bid across over 700 campaigns. Campaigns using Smart Bid had a 22% average higher conversion rate.
We are confident that this is a direct result of Smart Bid’s ability to make sure to have the optimal bid at the right times.
How to use Smart Bid.
We believe that Smart Bid should be the optimal setting for most campaigns. You should create Smart Bid campaigns alongside your current campaigns—especially if you have already done a lot of optimizations on them.
Having a few widely targeted Smart Bid campaigns alongside your current campaigns will ensure that you’re getting the most conversions or page-views you can.
One important point to make clear is that Smart Bid is designed to maximize conversions. It does not guarantee that you will hit your campaign CPA goals.
Instead, what we most often see is that Smart Bid campaigns have a more normalized or even CPA across the variables like site, platform, and geography. Try using a lower baseline CPC on Smart Bid campaigns at first; then you can let Smart Bid bid up at the right moments.
Finally, the best Smart Bid campaigns benefit from the New Taboola Pixel released earlier this year. The new pixel collects more diverse conversion data which helps fuel the Smart Bid engine. If you have not installed the Taboola Pixel, check out our help center articles on it here.
We hope Smart Bid helps you get more value out of the Taboola platform. We are looking forward to seeing how you use the new feature and what kinds of success you can achieve!