The holy grail of the future or another passing trend?

Taboola is one of the largest platforms for native advertising. In affiliate marketing, especially in the niche of nutra, the platform attracts attention due to its feature for working with huge audiences and testing ad creatives in different geos.

Andrey Kravchenko, former sales director of Taboola in Eastern Europe and Israel, now co-owner of one of the largest native advertising agencies Xevio, will help us understand the nuances of working with Taboola.

What is Taboola and how does it work?

Taboola was originally conceived as an advertising network that places endless scrolling ad blocks on websites around the world. Over time, the placements have been significantly diversified, and the blocks now can be found both in the mid article format and on the main pages of websites and even in smartphones made by  Apple, Samsung, Xiaomi and others (one of Taboola’s newest projects). The platform operates with both CPC (cost per click) and CPA (cost per action) payout models. 

Given the lack of targeting options, a feature of any traffic source with a closed ecosystem (Google, META), the network operates on the basis of a behavioral algorithm that personalizes advertising. This is possible because of he fact that it takes into account both the cookies of each individual user, as well as the context of the advertising environment, actions on the site and, as a result, potential interests.

Main advantages

Access to premium platforms around the world, even to such as BBC, MSN, Yahoo News, Apple, CNBC, Business Insider and others. In terms of sales, this gives access to a huge paying audience in Tier-1, Asia, and Latin America. In the USA, for example, the reach is over 105 million unique users per day.

There is no strict moderation, like they have on Facebook or Google Ads. Taboola is more loyal to affiliate marketing and dropshipping, issuing a reject rather than a ban in the worst case. However, the platform does not allow products of the nutra category that do not have either licenses or footnotes for clinical trials.  However, these are quite easy to find on sites like ResearchGate.

Ads look like part of the content, which increases user trust and improves click-through rates (CTR).

Will there be any disadvantages?

High entry threshold. The minimum budget for a start is $3,000, which may not be available to beginners. Accordingly, the price of traffic may also not be cheap, and in Tier-1 it reaches $0.5–$1 per click.

Checking the offers that you are launching. It will be problematic to drive traffic to gray or adult offers openly here, since each ad campaign is checked by moderators. If you violate the rules of the site, your account will be frozen, and so will your money. You can sell beauty and health products, but carefully consider your advertising and do not use fake news ads.

It is difficult for beginners to work here. The launch budget is not small, there are many nuances when choosing approaches and building a funnel, high requirements for the quality of advertising — think twice before making this source your main one.

How to work with Taboola

You can sign up to the service yourself on the website, but it is better to do it through a trusted manager. Alternatively, you can always try to buy an account from resellers, or from agencies, but then you’d need to get ready to pay for replenishing your account balance.

Expert view

Andrey Kravchenko, co-owner of the native advertising agency Xevio.

As a former employee, I inevitably run the risk of being biased. Nevertheless, I sincerely consider native advertising to be a fairly simple source. At Xevio in 2024, we have raised a little over $100M for Native and Social ads, and the total budget of the team has exceeded 250M over several years. For this reason, based on some experience, I will say that you don’t need much to launch.

Ad creative. All you need to do is make 12-15 advertising banners and 2-3 transit pages per split test.

Budget. $3,000 for a test is 100 dollars a day. With this amount, you can enter LatAm, Eastern Europe, even Asia. You’d need $5-10K for Europe, and definitely more for the States. Consider this an investment in data collection. You will assemble the rocket, optimize and scale it, while maintaining a high level of stability.

Tracking. A pixel is a good thing, but launching without getting postback is not such a great idea. Use a S2S, employ the landing page via Voluum, and test the LP CTR (your transit from the transit page to the landing). As soon as it is above 15%, you can safely proceed to optimization.

The final advice is to find a good manager via YouTube, conferences, forums (or even through us), and work hard. All managers have turnover targets, so if you prove yourself to be a professional with deep pockets and listening skills, you will certainly receive high–quality service. And there will be no need to bother with getting banned, strange requests for whitelists, microspending.

Conclusion

Taboola is great for promoting offers in the nutra vertical, if you properly take into account the specifics of the markets and create original, catchy materials. To achieve maximum results, it is important, as with other sources, to test different approaches, analyze metrics, and constantly adapt to the platform’s requirements and rules of conduct.