In order to get the most out of your campaigns, it’s important that you continually keep an eye on your campaigns. This way, you can assess if your campaign is performing for you then make changes to improve performance if necessary.
See below for our full list of optimization recommendations for improving the performance of your Taboola campaigns.
1. Make Sure Your Content Is Ready Before You Launch
Before setting up your campaign, it is important to make sure you have read through Taboola’s Creative Best Practices and Landing Page Best Practices. By following these best practices for your campaign items and landing pages, you will have the best chance of succeeding on Taboola’s network.
These best practices will also ensure that your campaign items and landing pages are as interesting and user-friendly as possible before adding them to your Taboola campaign.
2. Set Up Your Campaigns for Success
Even if you don’t know it, you are optimizing your campaigns before they even start! Setting up your campaigns for success is important, as it will give you the tools and information you need to make smart decisions to improve campaign performance. Here are some tips for setting up your campaign for success:
Create Multiple Campaigns, Organized By Content Type and Targeting
Separate your campaigns by device. Consumers will have varied experiences and behaviors on different platforms, and users on one device may be more likely to engage with your material. When a consumer is on their desktop, it may be easier for them to enter credit card information for a product transaction than when they are on their mobile device.
Separate your campaigns by location. Different locations differ in terms of performance and market competitiveness, similar to platform targeting. You may target audiences all across the world based on their individual behavior and interests by breaking down your campaigns into geographic buckets.
Separate your campaigns by-product or content type. Varying items and content kinds will almost certainly have different performances (conversion or engagement rates). We propose dividing up your campaigns in this manner from the start to give you the freedom to adjust your strategy per product or content type.
Set a Budget That Works For You
You’ll want to make sure you’ve set aside enough money to get started since this will provide you with adequate data to make informed judgments. You’ll be able to make better decisions on where you can increase campaign performance if you have enough data.
For instance, you might want to determine whether your marketing items perform better on desktop or mobile devices. To make an informed decision, you’ll need enough information. Setting a budget that allows for at least $50 in spending per day is recommended.
On the other hand, you don’t want to blow through your money without first reviewing campaign performance. Before making a large increase in your budget, we recommend starting with a tiny or “test” budget.
This way, you know that your campaign is performing for you before spending more of your budget.
Set a CPC That Works for You
Make sure you choose a CPC that will allow you to fulfill your performance objectives while also bringing in the required amount of traffic. If your CPC is too low, your campaign may not receive as many clicks as you’d like.
This is because items in your campaign with a higher CPC will be recommended more. You should also make sure that your CPC isn’t so high that the clicks aren’t worthless to you. Starting with a higher CPC at the start of your campaign is also a good idea.
This will make your campaign as competitive as possible, perhaps resulting in enough clicks to allow you to make informed optimization decisions. It will also aid the Taboola algorithm in its learning process.
Don’t Add Too Many Campaign Items At Once
You want to be able to manage your campaigns. If this is your first campaign with Pakoption, we recommend starting with a lower number of campaign products.
After evaluating performance and becoming familiar with the platform, gradually add more campaign products to your campaign. If you’re a performance marketer, start with one unique destination URL per campaign and add 5-10 different headlines and pictures to that URL.
We recommend starting with 10-20 distinct destination URLs for each campaign and adding 5-10 different titles and thumbnails for each destination URL if you’re a publisher or a business trying to increase brand recognition.
3. Improve Performance Through Titles and Thumbnails
“Pre-Qualify” Your Clicks. The experience the user will have on your landing page should be reflected in the headlines and pictures. Before they arrive at your landing page, the user should know what to expect; otherwise, they may be confused and depart before engaging with your website. Consider it like giving them a “taste” of your landing page.
By doing this, you will be driving clicks from users who are actually interested in the content on your landing page. This will ultimately help you reach your campaign goals.
Don’t Use Misleading Titles. While it may be tempting to choose a title that you know will entice users to click, keep in mind that if the visitor believes they have been misled in any way, they will leave the page nearly immediately. You’ll obtain more clicks from individuals who are actually interested in connecting with your material if you avoid misleading names.
Don’t Use Gimmicky Tactics. Examples are “Click Here” or “While Supplies Last”. Original and clever titles are much more likely to get a user to click.
Dynamic Keyword Insertion for Titles. Dynamic keyword insertion for titles allows you to dynamically place specified keywords in titles based on the user’s current location, the day of the week, or the device they’re using. This will enable you to build titles that are more tailored to your users, resulting in increased clicks and engagement.
An example of a title using this feature is “People in Phoenix, Arizona Can’t Get Enough of This Razor Subscription Service.” In this example, the location will dynamically change in the title based on where the user is.
4. Track Your Campaign Performance
Use the Pakoption conversion tracking code. It’s crucial to monitor how your campaign is progressing in relation to your goals. Pakoption offers a conversion tracking code that lets you see what occurs when a user clicks on a campaign item on your landing pages (s). This engagement-or conversion-data is displayed backstage so you can quickly assess performance and make informed optimization decisions.
Use Backstage reports to track performance. You have real-time campaign data available to you backstage. Using Backstage, you can easily monitor the performance of your campaigns.
Use URL parameters to track performance. URL parameters are an advanced tracking tool that helps you monitor users’ activities after they have clicked on your campaign items. Taboola URL parameters allow you to understand how users behave once they click on your Taboola campaign items using your analytics platform (e.g. Google Analytics or Adobe Omniture).
5. Target Highly Engaged Audiences
Monitor and adjust your campaign targeting based on performance. We recommend starting with the broadest targeting for your campaign as possible, then starting to narrow down targeting settings that work for your campaign. After you have enough clicks to your campaign, you can optimize your targeting in a couple of ways:
- (Recommended) For additional targeting choices, create fresh campaigns with different bidding and budget tactics. For instance, you may discover that Campaign A works better in the morning. You’re willing to pay a higher CPC first thing in the morning because you’ll get more traffic for those valuable clicks. Even though traffic in the afternoon and evening isn’t as good as it is in the morning, you may still run a campaign with a lower CPC during those hours and still get valuable hits. So, using the campaign scheduling function, you can adjust Campaign A’s schedule to only run your campaign items in the morning and establish Campaign B with the identical campaign things running in the afternoon.Then, based on performance, you can adjust your CPC and budget.
- Block alternatives for targeting that aren’t working for you. You can disable mobile targeting entirely if, for example, the device isn’t delivering positive results.
Here is a list of targeting options you should consider in your optimizations:
- Location targeting
- Device targeting
- Operation system targeting
- Campaign scheduling
- Content targeting
Retarget your campaign items to users who have shown an interest in your content. By taking advantage of Taboola’s retargeting feature, you can increase your engagement and conversion rates. Retargeting allows you to target users who have already visited your website or specific pages of your website.
Change your CPC by traffic source. Changing your CPC by traffic source is a useful strategy for achieving your campaign objectives. This functionality lets you adjust your CPC based on the performance of each traffic source. For example, you can raise your CPC on a traffic source that is performing very well for you, resulting in more clicks from that valuable traffic source.
6. Increase Click Volume
If you are happy with your campaign performance and want to drive more click volume to your Taboola campaigns, there are a few ways you can do this:
Increase the cost per click bid (CPC). Increasing your CPC will make your campaign items more competitive on the Taboola network, which will most likely lead to more clicks.
increase the click-through rate (CTR). Increasing your CTR will make your campaign items more competitive on the Taboola network, which will most likely lead to more clicks. You can try to increase your CTR by adding more title and thumbnail variations for tor landing pages. In other words, add more campaign items to your campaigns.
Add new campaign items. By adding more content items to your campaign, you are increasing the chances of finding a campaign item that users want to click on.
Increase targeting reach. If you can, try increasing the reach of your targeting options. If you are only targeting the US, for example, but are able to ship your product to Canada, then test out a campaign targeting Canada. As another example, if your desktop campaign is delivering positive results, then try testing a mobile campaign.
7. Boost Top Performing Campaign Items
After launching your campaign, you can see how your campaign items are performing in the “Top Campaign Content” report. In order to assess performance, you can look at a combination of click-through rate, conversion rate, engagement rate, and cost per action. Here’s what each one of these metrics will tell you about your campaign item:
Click-through rate (CTR): if the CTR of your campaign item is higher than the other campaign items in the campaign, this most likely means it’s interesting to users as they are clicking on your campaign item at a higher rate than others.
Conversion or engagement rate: CTR does not tell the whole story, though. It’s important to understand how users are interacting with your landing page after they click on your campaign item. The higher the conversion or engagement rate, the better that campaign item is performing for you and your goals.
Cost Per Action (CPA): CPA will inform you if the clicks on your campaign item are as valuable as they need to be to generate a good ROI (ROI). Purchases, email signups, and other performance targets are all examples of CPA. It can also be used to describe engagement indicators such as page views and video views. The most important thing to ask yourself is: how much am I willing to spend on a specific action on my website. This is your CPA objective, and it’s how you’ll know if a campaign item is profitable for you.
Pause Low-Performing Campaign Items
Following a review of the aforementioned data for your campaign items, if there are a considerable number of clicks per item (approximately 500-1000), you may want to consider suspending low-performing items.
When a campaign item is considered low-performing, it means it has a low conversion or engagement rate when compared to other campaign items in the same campaign. If this is the case, you can suspend the campaign items that aren’t doing well.
Isolate the top-performing campaign items.
If there are a considerable number of clicks per item (approximately 500-1000 clicks), you may want to start separating high-performing items after examining the following data for your campaign items:
When a campaign item is considered top-performing, it has a high conversion/engagement rate when compared to other campaign items in the same campaign. To do so, you’ll need to halt all other campaign items except the best-performing ones.
You can also start a new campaign for the campaign items you paused, with a CPC that is appropriate for your objectives.
8. Optimize Campaign Item Elements
Campaign item elements include titles, thumbnails, and landing pages. You can use Backstage reporting to assess which campaign titles, thumbnails, and landing pages are driving the best results for your campaigns.
You should allocate more budget to the versions of the campaign item elements that are performing the best. You can assess the performance of titles, thumbnails, and landing pages by using the following metrics:
Conversion or engagement rate: It’s important to understand how users are interacting with your landing page after they click on your title and thumbnail combinations. The higher the conversion or engagement rate, the better that title, thumbnail, or landing page is performing for you and your goals.
Cost Per Action (CPA): CPA will inform you if the clicks on your campaign item are as valuable as they need to be to generate a good ROI (ROI). Purchases, email signups, and other performance targets are all examples of CPA. It can also be used to describe engagement indicators such as page views and video views. The most important thing to ask yourself is: how much am I willing to spend on a specific action on my website. This is your CPA target, and it’s how you’ll know if a title, thumbnail, or landing page is working for you.
Pause Low-Performing Campaign Item Elements
If there are a substantial number of clicks (approximately 500-1000 clicks) after examining the above data for your titles, thumbnails, and landing pages, you may want to consider suspending low-performing titles, thumbnails, or landing pages.
When a campaign item element is low performing, it has a low conversion/engagement rate when compared to other campaign item elements in the same campaign. If this is the case, you can halt the titles, thumbnails, or landing pages that aren’t doing well.
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