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I GOT BANNED from Taboola (22)

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The unthinkable has happened... I just received an email to tell me that my Taboola account has been terminated.

In a world where Facebook & Google Bans were "part of the journey"...I moved into Native as I heard it was almost impossible to be banned.

Well it just happened...

And the WORST PART IS...

I didn't even break any rules (as far as I know)

It was my first campaign on Taboola. It was a 100% Whitehat campaign for an energy bill comparison site in the UK.

I initially set my campaign in Voluum to rotate two landing pages and two offer pages. But before it was approved I found out that they don't like rotating landers....so I changed the campaign to 1 Lander and 1 Offer.

It spent some money but i didn't have the pixel set up...so i paused it a couple of weeks ago.


That's it...but they sent me this email below which is implying that I have been cloaking or similar.

I've never cloaked or done any BH stuff. This was a very whitehat offer...just running to a vollum tracker link.

I'm so gutted...if I did do something wrong you would expect a warning at least.

Has anyone else been banned from taboola? Any tips on how to get the account back?

Thanks...

PS. let this be a warning...Taboola are obviously not so affiliate friendly as first thought.

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Interested in this as I have just recently started running on Taboola. I've seen someone on here mention before to make a junk campaign to your second lander to verify that it gets approved before adding it into the rotation of your main campaigns. I am not sure if that would have helped or not.

Also you may be able to just make a second account. I had my taboola banned for no reason also, something with billing issues. I just changed my IP and re-joined, and my ads have been spending fine for a few days now.

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Thanks...but the second lander was never even added in to the rotation. I changed the rotator with hours of submitting to Taboola, before anyone had even viewed it.

I just checked the campaign in my Voluum and it's still set to 100% weight on Lander 1...so I don't know whats caused this issue.

But yeah I may try creating a new account...but this was one of the reasons I ditched Facebook lol

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very interesting... I am now curious to see if Taboola are acting like Google and Facebook to not utilize redirects as it is a 'cloak' mechanism. Tracking looks like it will be strictly same domain soon.

Just make another account. Get a new rep.

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Yeah, i just used Voluum's standard re-direct link setting...and considering that Taboola is now fully integrated with Voluum you'd think they'd be ok with this.

Or at least, if this is an issue...give me a warning at least.

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Voluum recently wrote about there thoughts on redirect and its future... https://Voluum.com/blog/future-redirect-tracking/

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Interesting... I've heard that Taboola does ban folks on occasion but this is the first time I've ever encountered someone firsthand who it happened to...

I do know that I've been seeing a lot of cloacking on Taboola when I look at ads 'in the wild' lately... which I had never seen much of before, so its possible they are getting more strict/finicky about it...

It doesn't seem like they would ban you just for trying to run two separate lp iterations for the same campaign (although technically you're right that's against their policy)...

I'm wondering if the affiliate network with that offer has a "backup offer" redirect for people who click from the wrong geo or something...

So for instance, if that is a UK offer, and your affiliate network sends anyone who clicks on it who is not from the UK to some random dating or gambling offer or even sweeps or something, that could be the problem, if a Taboola moderation person from the wrong geo clicked on it...

It does seem in my experience that there is a disconnect between their moderation teams and their reps... so its possible you just had bad luck and got a bad rep on a bad day mixed with a couple other pieces of bad luck...

I would just sign up with a new account... you didn't do anything wrong, so just presume it's an accident..

I know how disheartening this kind of thing can be though... when I first tried to get into media buying and Bing and Youtube both banned me I was extremely frustrated, just because it makes you feel so powerless (like you it was not from actually purposefully breaking rules, just random or bad luck or something)...

So yeah... I'd sign up again... the only thing I'd recommend is make sure you're using a branded email address "johndoe@acmeadvertisingsolutions.com" or something like that... I think the native networks tend to be WAY more friendly when they see that vs when you use a personal address...

If you're worried about it you could also just send an email on the behalf of your current account explaining that you didn't purposefully do anything wrong and expressing regret that they banned you (I wouldn't tell them you're creating a second account though, just in case you get the random dbag on the other end).

But yeah, bit of a bummer but I wouldn't let it deter you from natives


PS If you can get going and spend a decent amount for a month or so you'll get a rep, which is a MASSIVE help... Honestly on other networks I hardly talk to my reps that much, but on Taboola it is a huge, huge help because without a rep there's basically no way to know why your ads or campaigns get denied (and much of the time there seems to be no reason and they get approved once your rep asks about it).

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Asked my rep after reading this and they suggested to split diff landers into diff creatives, instead of redirecting from tracker, to "avoid policy issues".

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Maybe your rep doesn't have a clear idea of how split-testing is supposed to work and whats the point in doing all of that. Basically with or without multiple landing pages the redirect happens from your campaign url to the landing page, so in the end it's just the landing page that changes.

^^ This can be one of the potential reasons. Sometimes the networks add trash offers for when the visit is out of targeting, especially the GEO. I've seen many offers redirect to offers that even on Pops are hard to get approved when accessing the link from another GEO.

@affilated4 if you're going to signup for another account on Taboola, make sure to handle the redirects on your own tracker. This way at least you will know where the visitor will land if the visit is coming from another geo.

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This would be my guess too... I've had my share of trouble with these "fallback" redirects too. At some point, I wrote an article about it, if anyone wants to read it here is the link:

http://matuloo.com/damn-fallback-red...es-fight-them/

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Thanks for your input guys...

But this is not the case...The offer was not with a generic CPA network. In fact it was a self hosted affiliate program that only allowed you to promote their own product.

The same page shows from every geo.

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@affiliated4

Did you contact Taboola and tried to explain the situation?

This would be the first thing I do before I sign up with a new account.

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Yes, I've emailed them and asked for a second opinion and tried to explain everything.

Let's just hope they're nothing like FB and Google...and they actually read my email before sending me a generic response

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I've had a friend go through a similar experience, what they'll make you do is sign an IO and you'll get your account back. Took awhile though on both sides, about a month. Def try to get a rep for this, that's crucial, not sure how it goes without a rep.

I'm not a lawyer so if you decide to go with the IO route, do it at your own discretion, dont take legal advice from me.

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Thanks, that's a positive I suppose...

What's an IO?

It's a brand new account with almost zero spend, so I don't have a rep.

Do you know how to get a rep?

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Maybe ask support for a rep? IO is Advertising Insertion Order. Also if you do go down the IO route, do so at your own discretion, i'm not a lawyer or anything so don't take legal advice from me.

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Thanks for the article. How did the situation evolved since you wrote it? Was your small rant useful :-)? Are affiliate networks more aware of the problem and willing to turn off fallback offers? or they still don't care?

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Hard to say really... with some networks, I'm able to get clean links with no redirects attached, some don't want to do it, or it's the advertisers who refuse to change their setup. But I'd say the situation got a bit better, it's easier to get redirect free offers now than it used to be, at least that's my feeling.

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Well I was just banned for this same reason. I created individual creatives to my landers to make sure they were allowed. They were all approved so I said fuck it I will just set up 1 link that splits so I can split test easier.

Instantly after creating a new set of ads I noticed my campaign status on theoptimizer was set to "FROZEN" and I could no longer log into my Taboola account. So I guess I should have listened to my rep who previously said to only test with 1 creative = 1 link and manually split test with multiple creatives.

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@affiliated4

What are your plans moving forward? Think you'll make a new account or just drop taboola?

I've been debating if I want to try to get around ban on a new account - or just run Outbrain for now and see if I can get that profitable.

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I had my Outbrain account banned a couple of years back for split testing landers, even though each different lander was totally compliant and had been previously approved.

Luckily my rep managed to get my account re-instated, but since then I just create separate ads for each lander. This is a pain, but I don't think it's worth the risk to rotate landers on Taboola or Outbrain.

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In 2009 I got my Zango (Lead Impact) account banned for exactly that reason.

That was really ridiculous

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