Taboola, along with Adblade and Outbrain, is one of the top sponsored content networks on the Internet. They power many of the “Sponsored Links” and “Stories you might like from around the Web” sections that you have probably seen on sites like the New York Times, TMZ, and USA Today to name a few. While certain implementations can appear rather spammy (e.g., a link to a story titled “10 Celebs You’d Never Guess Went Full Frontal On Film”), these links can be effective sources of incremental revenue for many sites.
Representation
J.P. Morgan Securities LLC acted as exclusive financial advisor to Taboola. Meitar Liquornik Geva Leshem Tal Law Offices and Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP acted as legal counsel to Taboola. Taboola was also supported by Citigroup Global Markets Inc.; Goldman, Sachs & Co. acted as financial advisor to Outbrain, and Meitar Liquornik Geva Leshem Tal Law Offices, White & Case LLP and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati acted as legal counsel to Outbrain.
About Taboola
Taboola is an advertising network and was founded by Adam Singolda in 2007 and has over 1,000 employees. The headquarters are in New York. Taboola is responsible for the “Around the Web” and “Recommended for You” link boxes you sometimes see at the bottom of web pages. They acquired ConvertMedia in 2016 which allowed them to expand their advertising to include video content as well. At the time of this review, Taboola has a B- rating on the BBB.
Taboola is renowned for providing native ads at the end of the articles on websites. After merging with Outbrain that was one of its biggest competitors. The combined company's customer list now includes 20,000 online properties with an audience of 2.6bn and Taboola and Outbrain believe that together they can go up against the biggest names in online advertising.
The deal itself has actually been in the making for years with reports of talks between the two companies going back as far as 2015. However, the deal has taken so long because it has been difficult to iron out the details between the two companies and getting longtime rivals to trust each other is never easy.
The combined group now has a long list of customers from the largest online media properties around today including CNBC, NBC News, USA Today, BILD, Sankei, Huffington Post, Microsoft, Business Insider, the Independent, El Mundo, CNN, BBC, The Washington Post, The Guardian, El Pais, Sky News and even TechRadar.
Main features of Taboola
- Retargeting
- Predictive Engine
- Always In Control
- Revenue From Native Advertising
- Maintains Editorial Control
- Targeting
- Monetizes Your Site
- Reporting
- Reaches Massive Audiences
What Taboola offers for a publisher?
- Content Recommendations
The sponsored links don’t need to be always ads. They are generally a mix of first and third-party content. The first party content is simply other articles from your website. These other articles can be recommended based on various factors like user’s interests, content on the current page, etc. When the recommended article is relevant to the user then the user is more likely to click on it, which increases the number of sessions on your website. This increased number of sessions leads to higher ad revenue. The third-party content will be from the advertisers who want to sell their product or bring traffic to their websites.
- Continual Feed
The Taboola Feed brings a continual, personalized content feed to the readers. This continuity of the feed has taken its leaf from the books of social media sites. Just like how Facebook and Twitter keep giving the users new content in their feeds to keep the users engaged and glued to their platforms, Taboola also tries to keep the users on your site till they find the right relevant content to read. If the user clicks a link in Taboola Feed, then it will be either from your site or from an advertiser, in both cases it is a win-win situation for you and the advertiser.
Placing Taboola recommendations at the end of the page is not the only option. You can choose to place them on the floating right box or in between the articles as well.
- Read More Button
Apart from recommendations Taboola also provides the “Read More” button which you might have seen on many websites. This button generally appears after the user has read an excerpt from the article. The remaining article is obfuscated by the button and the user has to click “read more” to view the remaining part of the article. The motive behind having the read more button is to bring the “sponsored links” way up to the top so that if the article is not able to grab the user’s attention in the beginning then at least the links would get a chance to do the same.
Taboola Benefits
By leveraging content that is engaging and relevant to your target audience, Taboola helps to drive interest and quality traffic to your website. Through customer engagement and user satisfaction, the content marketing platform facilitates the increase of conversions and revenue for your business.
The platform offers good lead tracking and content creation tools. It helps to monetize your content by promoting your site all over the world, increasing your chances of being discovered by audiences who may be interested in the type of content you’re sharing. The setup process is quick and simple, with a step-by-step guide to help users start and conduct a proper campaign from the ground up.
Tools and services are readily available to help you optimize your campaigns for your target audience and to ensure the best results and return on investment (ROI) possible. The essential tools for monetizing your content, if you’re a publisher, are easily accessible. Furthermore, they provide a proper step-by-step procedure to assist you with maximizing your revenues.
Taboola offers steady and reasonable revenue to publishers who are able to sustain a decent number of site visitors to their websites. Content promotion is made more convenient with a simple and easy to install widget. The platform also provides reliable customer support to facilitate the needs of users, regardless of whether it’s a publisher or an advertiser.
There are also website variations in different languages available, to allow access to everyone across the globe, especially non-English speaking countries. This ensures maximum exposure for your brand or business to a wider audience around the world.
User-friendly and fully customizable advertisements, targeted traffic, complete control over the content for both publishers and advertisers, and a good click-through rate (CTR)—these are just a few of the benefits that you can expect when using the Taboola content marketing platform, either as an advertiser or as a publisher.
Pros
- A good value on clicks: they have visitors for all CPCs!
- Worldwide reach and relatability: so many providers use Taboola. It's very easy to reach your audience wherever.
- High quality: their policies ensure that only enjoyable, modest content is provided.
Cons
- Account managers: some of them underestimate the effort that goes into creating the creatives and the landing pages, and suggest abandoning them instead of helping (with a simple instruction of a few words) to make them acceptable.
- Strict content policies and human preferences being mixed up. Inconsistency sometimes sneaks into the review process.
- Deleting campaigns created in error: with a bin function even! That would be great.
Taboola Pricing
Pricing for Taboola’s content marketing platform is mainly based on the customer’s personal setup. This includes the creative aspect, budgeting, and targeting. As a user, you only pay when leads or site visitors actually click on your ads and reach the actual advertiser’s website. You may contact Taboola directly to get information about the pricing. For Taboola’s self-service option, a standard marketing campaign starts at $10 per day.
For more information about Taboola’s pricing and payment rates, you may visit their official website or contact the company directly to get a more complete picture of possible costs and expenses.
Let see reviews from member who used Taboola
- Used taboola. It's a wave of traffic on demand which is cool. As much as you want, but was garbage traffic for me.. If you have a generic product it might work ad there is no filtering. Besides states
- I think outbrain and taboola etc have the potential to be great... they are just shooting themselves int he foot because only crap content is making it's way to the top (top being the big publishing companies). Eventually people will stop clicking on these ads as much and publishers will look for the next innovation.
- Taboola has really premium sites as well and is larger than outbrain at this point. They offer white listing so you only bid to be on better sites too. We love them! Much better service than outbrain.
- In terms of payment, I work on the publisher side with Taboola, and they make use of Payoneer which works pretty seamlessly. Perhaps see if this is a possibility from an advertiser side.
- Taboola is great company regardless of their platform, and I’m happy their CEO is taking over. Say what you want about clickbait etc, you’re not even looking at the company’s final form. Mark my words, in 5 years the whole platform will be completely different, and they will give Google & Facebook a run for their money.
Conclusion
Taboola was designed and developed to provide advertisers and publishers with a reliable and feature-rich content marketing platform. On those aspects, the solution actually does quite well. It is a good content discovery platform that offers a wide range of tools and capabilities for businesses to advertise their brand and products/services.
From the perspective of content creators and publishers, the platform serves as a good avenue for them to monetize their content and optimize it to target the right audience, engage site visitors, and increase conversions. The platform works on the model of pay-per-click (PPC) marketing campaign, cost-per-click (CPC), and cost-per-thousand (CPT) marketing metric.
