Launching your first Taboola campaign is exciting—all at once, you gain the ability to access audiences on the open web and to target them by market, device, operating system, data segments and more.
It can be a bit overwhelming your first time, and our account managers work hard to ensure your campaign takes off from the start.
That being said, we have identified best practices that apply to performance marketers across the board, that we use to help them more effectively target their campaigns.
“When you think about optimization for your campaign, start by looking at the performance by site, not just simply region and spend.” – Sean Adkins, Media Account Manager, UK, Taboola
Taboola Media Account Manager in the United Kingdom (UK), Sean Adkins, shares the basis for these best practices:
“Every publisher naturally attracts a certain type of audience by the content they produce,” Adkins said. “When you think about optimization for your campaign, start by looking at the performance by site, not just simply region and spend.”
We’re taking a dive into some of the most popular key performance indicators (KPIs) for our performance marketers, and how you can use your Taboola campaign data to best optimize and hit those goals.
Target your campaigns by country.
When you’re just starting your campaign with Taboola, it’s tempting to launch your campaign and target all devices, in a bunch of countries, at once.
This is particularly tempting for clients with global campaigns, who are targeting a variety of regions and countries with a single campaign, or piece of content.
In reality, the competitive landscape (and therefore, appropriate cost per click (CPC)) for every market and device is different—as is the performance of each creative and piece of content you launch.
Focusing on targeting specific devices and countries in tandem with tracking the performance of each of your creatives will allow you to gather more insights into these markets as you go, and make it easier to optimize and pivot to reach your goals.
Have a true CPA target, instead of aiming for the lowest number.
For many marketers, the goal is to obtain the lowest cost per acquisition (CPA) possible. They think the lower the CPA, the better they will scale.
When you set your CPA target, have a tangible goal for sales, leads, email sign-ups, video completion rate, or any another metric that’s important for your campaign.
If you come out of the gate with an arbitrary CPA goal, for example, $1.00, chances are you won’t be as successful. Adkins recommends starting with a larger CPA goal that’s still realistic for your objectives and as you optimize, your CPA should decrease.
Utilizing a healthy CPA target allows you to bid a higher CPC, and see more conversions. All of the optimization changes you make after the fact will be to support the goals you’ve previously defined—this is what creates true scalability.
The Taboola network hosts thousands of publishers, giving marketers access to a massive new user base. This new user base has the potential to convert—consider the value of new users signing up to your website, as well as the value of that initial and possible future conversions when putting together your CPA target.
A really good CPC is about conversions, not cost.
CPC is another common performance metric that is often misunderstood. CPC is your key to increasing the amount of conversions you’ll generate with Taboola. Savvy advertisers will utilize high CPCs to maximize their scale across the network—as it brings higher amounts of traffic.
Adkins recommends starting with a higher CPC to achieve a higher volume of impressions, and therefore traffic, to start. From there, you’ll collect more data and will see when and how your traffic is converting to optimize creatives for better performance.
When you start with a low CPC out of the gate, you’ll receive a lower volume of traffic, and therefore have a harder time optimizing your creatives to attract conversions, and scale.
Don’t forget about the data.
A caveat to these recommendations is data—make sure that the data for your target audience is significant enough in size to be actionable.
“Be willing to test your content across the network and give your customers enough time to convert first.” – Sean Adkins, Media Account Manager, UK, Taboola
When looking at Taboola data, pay specific attention to actions and clicks. Adkins pointed out a good example:
“If you’re looking at conversion data, and there are less than ten people that have converted on a particular publisher or piece of content, you shouldn’t make broad optimizations based on this small dataset,” Adkins says. “Be willing to test your content across the network and give your customers enough time to convert first.”
All of this advice is easy to follow in theory, but it’s easier to gain a better understanding with a step-by-step walkthrough of how to do so on our platform.
These 5 Steps Put these Recommendations into Practice.
Launching your first campaign with Taboola is a new experience, and is a bit easier with a guide on where to go, and what to do first.
Here’s what we recommend:
- Navigate to your specific campaign via the Taboola dashboard.
- Select the ‘By Site’ tab.
- For the best results, look at sites with at least 10 conversions or 500 clicks.
Continue expanding your date range if more data is needed—seven days is our recommendation to start, but up to 30 days can also be useful. - Now, pay attention to the top publishers.
The difference between your CPA target, and the CPA achieved that you’ll see listed for these publishers, is often the CPC boost you can select.
So for example, if you are under CPA target by 20% for a particular publisher, then boost the CPC by 20%!
This shifts more of your spend and impressions towards the publishers you can see are driving the best performance.
To calculate your perfect CPC per publisher, use the following formula and make the CPC adjustments accordingly:
CPA Target x Publisher Conversion Rate = Target CPC. - You have the power to change your CPC boost by -50% to +50% as well as to block any publishers that aren’t meeting your target.
The CPC boost is a percentage of the CPC that is set in ‘Campaign Management’ for your campaigns.
With these best practices, you’re on your way to gaining the insights you’ll need to hit your KPIs and scale your performance with Taboola.
As you look to optimize your content as you go, check out our best practices for creatives and landing pages for the best chance of attracting your audience and getting them to convert.
Taboola is the world’s leading content discovery platform, serving 360B recommendations to over 1B unique visitors each month on the web’s most innovative publisher sites. To learn more about how Taboola can help you A/B test your site content, contact us or start your campaign.