Taboola Smartbid Algorithm: Does It Actually Work? (3)
Hey guys,
after reading the positive feedback of some of the people here about the Taboola Smartbid algorithm I decided to put some more faith in it and let it run for a while, without messing with manual placement optimizations.
The goal was to see if the performance (in terms of CPA) was going to improve after a while (Spoiler: it didn't happen).
If I'm not mistaken according to best practices it takes Taboola about 70 conversions to start optimizing. In the example below the campaign ran for 150 (so it should be enough data):
On average the CPA is still pretty much the same of the first days (actually starting to look worse), so it would seem like it didn't change a thing.
In your experience what kind of improvements you see over time with Taboola's Smartbid algorithm?
In my experience the smartbid does optimize, a bit, but it's certainly not a miracle worker. One thing I've noticed, it that campaigns that don't get sufficient daily spend/conversions it struggles with. The 'magic number' seems to be around 6-8 conversions per day, much lower and it seems to struggle with lack of data and causes more harm than good after a few days. From your stats your campaign has 5.5 conversions a day, so you might be right in that zone.
There's a lot of other factors at play that could be hurting the campaign. If the vCPM/CTR is falling, or if the actual CPC goes substantially over the bid CPC that can mess things up too.
Originally Posted by vee882
after reading the positive feedback of some of the people here about the Taboola Smartbid algorithm I decided to put some more faith in it and let it run for a while, without messing with manual placement optimizations.
The goal was to see if the performance (in terms of CPA) was going to improve after a while (Spoiler: it didn't happen).
If I'm not mistaken according to best practices it takes Taboola about 70 conversions to start optimizing. In the example below the campaign ran for 150 (so it should be enough data):
On average the CPA is still pretty much the same of the first days (actually starting to look worse), so it would seem like it didn't change a thing.
In your experience what kind of improvements you see over time with Taboola's Smartbid algorithm?
Looking at your numbers it looks like you were doing pretty good from Nov 4th through 16th, but then your cpc's starting climbing quite a bit, from 40 cents up to 50 now. This mirrors exactly what we've seen in the last couple weeks too - steadily increasing cpc's along with decreasing volume- all on account of the big brands and ecom shops increasing their spend in anticipation of Black Friday I imagine.
The main thing the SmartBid should help with is the conversion rate, which should (hypothetically) get better over time as it learns what kind of folks are mostly likely to convert. Obviously the ads you run have a huge impact on that too though, so it's always a push/pull between getting vCTR up and keeping cpc's down without getting too clickbaity and losing cvr on the backend.
But yeah, in my opinion biggest variable on Taboola is ad. When that algo finds an ad it likes that just can move mountains... which is a double-edged sword, as I kind of like the fact that on Outbrain (for instance) I can usually have a few good ads all getting some decent spend, and the spend seems to almost perfectly correlate with their ctr, whereas on Taboola the algo seems to fall in love with specific ads, and sometimes it's not apparent why it likes one so much over another (again though when it works it really works).
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