Taboola is killing me... (6)
Hi everyone,
Last week I launched a few ecom camps on Taboola.
Three different offers. Kept content down to batches of 5-7 banners and 2 Lps per campaign to limit the variables.
Blacklisted a couple of high volume, no sales, tier 3 geos and pressed go.
Over 7 days one camp took off a bit and was in positive roi doing 20 sales/day. The other camps were only looking better as I lowered site cpcs and cut banners everyday. All camps had started to tip over into positive. I Did a large optimisation of targeting and cutting content down to the best funnels. ROI should have been 100-300% afterwards. Decided to bump cpcs by double in an effort to increase volume on the camps that were green and in healthy roi.
The next day, everything just died or exploded...
Not a technical. Still getting the same traffic roughly from the same sites and geos. Was getting more traffic and Spend shot up but the funnels didn’t back out at all. In fact the conversions remained the same or went dramatically down, whilst my spend tripled putting me deep in negative.
What am I doing wrong here on the optimising side? Taboola has always been a total mystery to me - I have literally no strategy with Taboola as there seems to be no rules to work around!!!
I guess my questions are:
1) are there cpm levels within the traffic that offer you dramatically better converting traffic?
2) how can you actually scale a 200% roi, 10 sale/day camp on Taboola, other than raising the cpc which seems to kill the roi dead?
Tagging our native expert @thedudeabides here, he should be able to give you some tips 
I'll chime in.
Taboola is all about making small changes. The same thing has happened to some of my campaigns, basically, once something works on Taboola you don't want to do anything drastic. Their algorithm is very "fragile".
Don't suddenly block a big chunk of traffic, cut creatives 1 by 1, up the cpc and daily budget slowly. Let their Smartbid do the scaling for you, sometimes all you have to do is double your daily budget and wait 2 days before it kicks in.
To answer your questions from my experience:
1. Nope. I've had ecom campaigns in the same geo work on a broad range of CPM's.
2. Something you can try is to simply duplicate your campaign a few times and try different bids. Other than that I would double the daily budget until it stops maxing out, then up the cpc and repeat this process. My own rule is to make max 1 cpc + budget adjustment to a campaign per day on Taboola.
And always keep trying to improve your ads, if you're at 200% roi you're probably being very specific. Try a more clickbaity ad, your ROI will drop but you will be able to scale much higher and get more profit.
But yeah, I agree. Sometimes it makes no sense... Not all hope is lost though, usually when this happened to me the campaign made a comeback after a few days.
Some good pointers above, but I'll add my 2 cents.
1) Nope, just that to unlock some of the high volume sites like MSN you're going to have to bid high and/or have good clicking ads.
2) Was the campaign actually 200% ROI daily at low volume or was that you were projecting? After roughly how much spend?
Early on there's going to be a lot of variance and it pays to be mindful of the monte carlo effect with regards to creatives, placements, and ads. Otherwise you can cut down to a small handful of placements that seem to be performing best early on only to be surprised that your results aren't much different.
Best to just let smartbid due its thing honestly and raise budget caps while slowly lowering bids in beginning, especially if you're already tipping towards break-even on your first few campaigns. Sounds like you're getting the hang of things real quick otherwise.
Originally Posted by thedudeabides
By "budget caps" you mean to increase daily/monthly spend while lowering the CPC?
Originally Posted by galaxyads
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