This article will review how Taboola works, including how we surface personalized recommendations and how the auction works.
How Taboola Works: Overview
Taboola is one of the world’s leading performance advertising platforms for the open web. Through our exclusive partnerships with many of the world’s top websites, we help advertisers engage with over 600 million unique daily active users. You have probably seen our ads natively integrated into sites like Yahoo,, NBC News, MSN, The Independent and The Weather Channel.
With massive scale, unique readership data and world-class AI technology, we help tens of thousands of advertisers reach and convert their audiences with compelling native ads in a brand-safe environment.
- Your content and ads recommended on thousands of top web sites
- Higher engagement across a wide variety of ad formats
- Support for all of your goals - drive sales, generate leads, drive traffic to your site, and more
- Discover new audiences- Taboola offers advertisers access to over 1 billion users who have yet to discover your blogs, articles, videos, apps and more
- Powerful insights and targeting options for reaching your best new customers
- Transparent, actionable data––get a 360-degree look at what’s working best, and where you can improve to see your best campaign performance.
The Taboola Predictive Engine
Taboola’s platform is powered by Deep Learning technology that uses Taboola’s unique data about people’s interests and information consumption to recommend the right content to the right person at the right time.
Whenever you launch your campaign with Taboola, our algorithm analyzes your content and extracts a large number of “signals” that will help the technology match it to people who are most likely to engage and take action. The algorithm predicts good matches across Taboola’s publisher network and begins recommending your content while gathering results.
With time, the algorithm learns which audiences are more likely to engage with your content based on their reading preferences, browsing history, device, location, time of day and more, and prediction accuracy increases.
It is important to give the predictive engine time to optimize your campaign, and to test a number of content items, titles and images. Taboola’s in-platform tools and features take the guesswork out of blind testing and give you performance suggestions to reach your best audience faster.
How Your Campaign Items are Recommended
The Taboola algorithm looks at two important factors to help figure out when and where to recommend your campaign items––Click-Through Rate (CTR) and Cost Per Click (CPC).
CTR, or click-through rate, is an indication of how interested users are in your content. The higher the CTR, the more your campaign items will be recommended to users.
CPC, or cost per click, is an indication of how much you are willing to pay per click. The higher the CPC, the more competitive your campaign items will be across the network, which means they will be shown more often. Additionally, You can increase your CTR by following our title and thumbnail best practices, which you can learn more about here.
Taboola’s Smart Bid feature takes the guesswork out of manual bid adjustments in order to ensure that advertisers are getting their most effective placements at the lowest cost.
SmartBid leverages data from billions of conversions to bid intelligently at the right moments across Taboola’s ever evolving network, bidding competitively on higher-converting publishers and lower on lower-converting publishers, and making sure you’re not missing out on key conversion opportunities. This can now be used while optimizing for Max Conversions or for Target CPA.
Advanced Targeting
You can target your Taboola campaign based by location, time, browser type, connection type, audience segments, and more. Your campaign targeting options will impact where your content will be shown. You can learn more about targeting here.
Publisher Acceptance
Your campaign items will only have the chance to appear on publishers that accept your specific type of content. For example, some publishers may not want political advertisements on their website. So, if you are running a political advertisement, your campaign items will not be able to appear on that publisher site. You can learn more about how your campaign items are categorized here.
Read More: