MoPub was a mobile ad server owned by Twitter since the September 2013 acquisition, acquired by AppLovin, and now part of the MAX mediation platform. MAX gives users a diverse set of auctions for supply.
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Taboola
Score 8.0 out of 10
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Taboola is a native advertising platform from the company of the same name in New York for publishing "recommended" content in a variety of popularly visited news sites and spaces. Taboola is partnered with many publishers (the Atlantic, Tribune, MailOnline, Business Insider, etc.).
MoPub is perfect for US in app campaigns. They are able to offer inventory worldwide, but clearly the US is their home turf and the place where they feel most comfortable. They work well for performance campaigns, but I would not use them for branding purposes. They are very responsive and keep improving their product offering to stay competitive.
I think Taboola is great for either lead gen or for shopping product sites. I would definitely have a full-time person running the campaigns. If not managed properly, things can get out of hand with costs going up and conversion rates dropping.
I have noticed that customer support has decreased in the past year as Taboola has grown. It sometimes takes four days or more for a campaign to be approved. It used to be immediate and always within 24 hours.
Credit card billing with high fees is now mandatory. If a company is going to make credit card billing mandatory don't charge fees. Our expense has increased by around 2.5% which I need to always keep in mind when comparing the CPC of campaigns on competing platforms.
Our customer support rep used to give us a lot of help with optimization. We stopped getting support from her over eight months ago and we recently got an email that we now have to contact support@taboola.com even though our spend had almost doubled! However, we just were informed that we will now have a new rep, hopefully we will get more support now. When I say support I mean a rep that contacts us with optimization ideas.
MoPub is a great SSP. It is a trusted partner that can help you scale campaigns as well as educate the client about the benefits of programmatic advertising. They have a lot of inventory and a great support team. I wouldn't say they are perfect because reporting is not very good and some billing issues are not as transparent as they should be.
It was pretty straightforward getting an account set up and having an account rep assigned. Compared to some other platforms Taboola is actually rather intuitive when it comes to navigating the user interface. Pixel implementation was easy and we didn't have any discrepancies tracking conversions. Also the ability to target LALs was very useful and semi-straightforward to upload.
MoPub's support is really good. Their team is knowledgeable on their product and the programmatic ecosystem in general and they are very helpful. The only 2 things that I would point out would be that their response times are not very fast and that there is a lot of rotation on the account management team.
Support on Taboola has been great. We have always been in constant communication with their team and they have answered all of our questions and helped us when we had any issues or concerns.
We've been attempting to make AppLovin Max perform the same way as MoPub had for us. The value we get from AppLovin Max differs from the ROI we get from other mediation platforms. We keep convincing ourselves that AppLovin Max will eventually function similarly to MoPub.
Taboola ranks pretty low for us, right next to Criteo and Revcontent, but above Traffic Junky. It's still nowhere as good as the social media platforms or Google. We selected Taboola because we had previously run ads years ago and wanted to see if we could make it profitable again. It offers more targeting options than Revcontent and Traffic Junky. I didn't care for the billing by credit card though. I would much prefer a net 15 or net 30 plan.
Taboola guarantees stable user flow across the campaign period. I use balanced spending setting on my campaign so that the budget is well spread throughout the month, but usually, the traffic is higher nearing the end of the campaign.
New users and more awareness. Taboola allows us to reach potential readers without much hassle.
Users from Taboola are a high-quality audience who spend a lot of time on your website and read several pages. Unlikely to be bots.
