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Taboola's Algo (27)

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What are your guys' opinion about the budget on Taboola?

I started a new campaign with 1550 monthly budget. Surprisingly I got spend around 100$ during the learning phase although some days around 50$. Let's say I'm doing quite Okay with performance (leadgen camp) - Should I just modify the campaign budget to 3000, then further?

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That's what I do. I pretty much just treat it as a daily budget but x30... although it will definitely go up and down about 50% in either direction depending on the day...

You can kind of also kind of judge your bid/cpc/etc by how fast its spending...

If its spending more than 1/30th of your monthly budget it seems like that is suggesting that you have a bit of room to lower your bid, OR to raise the budget and still hit it.

If you're not getting 1/30th of it spent each day, that seems to suggest that your bid is too low or your budget is too high.... this is what I really don't like, because I feel like it means that the SmartBid is going to be more desperate for any clicks it can get, and will be showing my ads on more bad impressions than I'd like.

Sweet spot feels like just in the middle, where you're bidding high enough that the budget is capping, but not overbidding and leaving money on the table.

We've done as low as 400$ a month on some search arb campaigns... and then I've jacked it up into the six figures before too... although now I prefer having multiple campaigns at the 30-42k/month range as I feel like that's the sweet spot... so instead of on 90k campaign I'd rather have three identical 30k ones, if that makes sense...

Anyway though I'm sure as always there's wildly different strategies, so hopefully @platinum will chime in too and maybe @thedudeabides. Would love to hear what other folks think as well!

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By creating 3 identical campaigns, won't someone be bidding against themselves?

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I guess depending on how you look at it... but I don't think it really matters... if it was Revcontent where there are fixed-size widgets then it might be, but Taboola is infinite-scroll, plus its so massive that the identical campaigns would still just be a drop in the bucket...

But yeah, you are right, if you were targeting only a specific set number of sites (say 20-30) and those sites had fixed widgets where there was a max number of ads that could show at any time, then it could be a problem. Taboola's setup is just different because its almost all infinite-scroll and because its so large. In a really small geo though it could hypothetically have the same problem (for instance I ran in Slovenia for awhile and 90% of the traffic came from only two sites).

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On most networks campaigns will hardly compete with each other unless you have like 40+ clones or something like that (at least on OB this won't happen). Meanwhile, for Taboola I'm under the impression that they will likely enter in a competition on a lower number of clones. It's something I haven't thoroughly tested as I've had no reason to. However, it's worth noting that sometimes when cloning camps, the traffic source algo "won't have the same feelings" for the new camp like it did with the original one, sometimes it won't deliver quality at all, and sometimes it will deliver better quality traffic.

^^ Good point! This is another thing to consider. In large GEOs is easier to deal with competition, but on smaller ones the possibilities are higher. Again here it's worth taking in consideration how open the inventory your account has access to is.


I usually prefer running with daily budget caps rather than monthly ones for two main reasons:

1. It gives more control in terms of ad spend by preventing high spending days that might not get backed up by results.
2. On good performing days it is easier to scale the daily spend by 2x or 4x whenever possible - reset the daily budget on the next day - then repeat.

One detail that might help with the quality is the campaign spending limit. When setting high limits (even unrealistic ones) it tends to deliver better results compared to lower ones.

Also, the site level Avg. CPC is a good indicator of what bid levels the SmartBid is placing to get traffic from specific sites. If it's far higher than the avg campaign bid, it generally means that the competition on that placement is high, and most probably I need to bid higher to get more traffic from that site, if lower then the opposite. I like keeping a close eye on the results, when bidding higher doesn't necessarily mean that the results are guaranteed.

Something else I've seen being quite effective is switching the bidding strategy on the site level from SmartBid to FixedBid once there are enough data to back up the bid control.

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Guys above already covered this in detail, but just to simplify it if I may

The bigger the traffic source and the more broad your targeting, the less you have to worry about competing/bidding against yourself.

In a tiny country, with tight targeting, with limited amount of available widgets... yes, it could be an issue. But when targeting a large GEO on a large source, I really wouldn't worry about this at all.

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Yeah, I actually didn't think it through correctly at first as for Native I have only bought on VoluumDSP so was thinking in terms of bumping up CPMs for me. Now that I have given it some thought I see why cloning the well performing campaign is preferable for direct native buys as one can get more traffic from infinite scroll on Taboola and dominate the limited widget area, for sites with limited widgets with our own ads instead of competitors as in the end we only pay for clicks.

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I would highly recommend trying native networks directly.

Besides the buying model where in my opinion is more efficient, it also has some differences in terms of quality.

Please note that I don't mean that DSP traffic isn't good, but overall direct traffic tends to be easier to optimize.

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From your experience guys, when duplicating campaigns on Taboola, is it better to place a new tracker link? (is the algorithm affected anyhow by that?)
Or does it absolutely not matter except for our own tracking convenience?

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Personally I would create a new campaign for this with a new tracking link. The clone can behave differently so I'd want the traffic in a separate campaign in order to analyze it better. Based on the performance, you might have to do some changes to it at the traffic source too... different bid or blocking something, so that basically makes it a new campaign.

As for the algo effect, no idea if it looks at the url... @platinum @jack_I any idea guys?

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When duplicating camps on Taboola, better use slightly different variations of images (even zoomed in images can do the trick) or headlines. Otherwise going for the same exact targeting, images and headlines within the same Taboola account will likely have campaigns compete with each other.

Optionally you can try to create identical clones of the same campaign on another subaccount, but there it depends how the other subaccount is setup in terms of targeting (maybe optimized per a different vertical or geo), as well as account level site blocking.

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That's quite insightful @platinum, thank you!

How does making variations to the creatives can solve this problem?

Another question is if you were running a 40$ budget per day search arb campaign with very solid ROI, would you up the budget to lets say 100-200 per day, or make duplications of that campaign?

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Not 100% sure how Taboola algo looks at the campaign assets, but general feedback is that it needs slight variations of the creatives.

In regards to scaling, better raise the budget slowly rather than duplicating camps. Or if you duplicate, introduce slight variations to the ads, then maybe start it with a higher budget.

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So you're saying that the slight change in creatives affects the algo somehow to not compete with each other? That's interesting. I also noticed that the camp is spending through it's daily budget within like a couple of hours so in that case a duplicated campaign could be simply in a different running schedule and not compete with each other at all??

Thank you in regards to scaling. Up to what daily budget would you suggest scaling search arb camps?

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If we're talking about the image, slight change makes it NEW in the eyes of pretty much any algo. So if a given algo aims to reach some level of variety, it might limit the exposure of campaigns that are using exactly the same images or ads. So yes, makes a lot of sense.

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Interesting, I wonder if slight color correcting also works
@platinum
I know there's not a one-size fits all answer, but perhaps you can assist with some sort of a guideline regarding scaling?

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Simple color correcting hasn't worked for me, but certain filters have.

I'd just start putting laser-eyes on everything

Common answer I've heard for scaling is slowly, like a boring 10% bump in budget per day. Otherwise, bad things happen.

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Lol ... start with photo of old person, paste in front of Walmart, add ambiguously looking identity documents in her hand, finish up with... lazer eyes. EPC moon.

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@platinum Can you please explain what do you mean when you say that Taboola doesn't like when we change the bids too often (like every day)? Sounds weird to me.

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Well, there are various factors worth taking in consideration in that regard.

1. Impression vs. Click time

On native, it is somehow unknown at what time an ad impression was served and when the ad was clicked. If you do frequent bid changes (like every 10-30 minutes), it will be virtually impossible to attribute the results to the actual bid level that delivered better results.

2. SmartBid

I'm considering that all your campaigns have conversions as a main objective, right? In that case, if most of your campaigns are running using Smartbid, then Taboola has to find the bid sweet spot to get you most of the conversions at the lowest cost possible. While doing so, it will take in consideration your actual campaign bid, then run test based of that moving the bid in the -99% to +100% of your actual bid. When you change your main bid too often, as a consequence it will change the bid range window for Taboola's algo too, in which case if done too frequently, might even cause some sort of reset to the potential optimal bids. When you bid higher it tells Taboola that you're profitable and you want more traffic, maybe at a higher cost, and when you bid lower, it tells Taboola that the traffic your purchasing is costing too much.


Just think of it as if you were to play with Facebook - any daily budget changes (increase/decrease) by more than 25% of your current daily budget, will most likely reset the current learning phase of the campaign.

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That's interesting, yes my main objective is conversions with smartbid. Would you say once in a day changing of site level bids is too frequent?

Also, would flipping an image horizontally (mirroring) when duplicating a campaign be enough for the algo to send enough traffic to that new campaign and not compete with each other? Color correcting?

And why should we increase the budget slowly? Like 10% per day? I thought on native you can increase budget quite rapidly..?

@jack_l @platinum on what daily budget are you usually running your search arb campaigns? (per campaign)

Have you found the "phenomenon" on Taboola where a campaign would run let's say at 40$ daily spending and then suddenly decrease to 5$ (or 100$ decrease to 40$ - staying at 40$ consistently like a machine while budget is 100$)? Increasing the CPA goal didn't help, so did duplicating with the same creatives (but with changing creatives/URL - I am yet to find out... moderation!!)

I currently have one single copy of campaign pulling decent profits and CPA on 120$ daily spending. Other people said they run 100's of camps to have 1k in daily revenue...

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Hey bru,

Extremely good questions...

That last part about "how many campaigns" and how much each spends is literally like the "keystone" for being profitable on natives in my opinion.

To address that first, you can check my actual #'s in my follow-along I update quarterly if you're interested in my own struggles in that regard but usually I wind up with like 50-100 camps that get some amount of spend during the month, with 50-70% of them being in the red overall, and maybe 30-50% having spend on all 30 days. That's total spending anywhere from 3k-10k per day usually.

Biggest individual campaign I've ever had is maybe 3k per day. But if you combine the 'sub-campaigns' together, biggest 'campaign' I've had is maybe 10k per day, but that's rare. I know some dudes do even more than that on big US verticals though.

Re: search arb, I am actually taking a break from it. Its awesome and I really like it but I was really struggling with it in April and May so decided to take a few months off on it. Still think its a great niche though and will run it in future I'm sure.

And then I wouldn't worry too much about the daily spend variance on smartbid. I think that's actually it looking out for you and not spending as much on low volume days, bad days, etc. If you're consistently every day though not getting 1/30 of the monthly spend amount, then maybe change it, but I try to change the bid and budget not more than once every few days ideally, unless I'm way in the green then I'll steadily increase it each day.

No one way to do it though... I once had a random campaign where I couldn't get the conversion posting to work, and I made like 5k profit on smartbid without even passing conversions lol, so its not like everything has to be perfect for it to work (and I've lost tons of money on campaigns I thought I had 'perfectly' set up).

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Hey @platinum , hope you're doing great buddy.

A little question as to the above:

Would you suggest to go with daily budget and then on the spending limit section to pick monthly limit right?
So just to make sure I got you, it would work better if I'd go with high one like much more then 30 x the daily budget which I set? even unrealistic one?

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@jack_l when you're duplicating a certain campaign and making minor tweaks to it hoping that Taboola "picks it up differently" and gives you a better CPA (if I understood you correctly), are you making a new tracking link? Because I noticed that if you just copy the ads then the campaign won't go into moderation an just start running immediately.

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Hey man -

So sometimes I'll just clone it exact and leave the ads... just to sort of diversify the spend on the camp in case the main one falls apart for some reason... and so that new ads don't have as much potential to cause huge problems (i.e. if you're spending 2k/day on one single camp and a high ctr but low cvr ad suddenly steals the top spot while you're sleeping and spends $1200 at a huge loss - compared to having four $500/day camps where one bad ad can't do as much damage)...

And then on other occassions I'll create a new version of a campaign using a different campaign link from Thrive, different image files, and even a different sub-account (Taboola can give you multiple sub-accounts if you want).

I had a bunch of campaigns in one vertical that all kinda died this spring after about 18 months of doing well, and restarting them all in another sub-account with different campaign links helped get them all going well again. Not sure if that is the reason - coulda been a more macro thing that just coincided with me doing so - but yeah... any way and every way, I guess would be my answer

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hey @jack_l , hope hope you're doing great man

a little question as to the sub accounts - do you use them per vertical or per offer?

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No hard and fast rule... I have a couple that I've done tons of stuff in... and some I've tried to keep for a single vertical... jury's still out on whether it actually helps using multiple ones... just another variable to test

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