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.).
$10
Starting Price Per Day
Yahoo Native
Score 6.6 out of 10
N/A
Yahoo Native (formerly Yahoo Gemini) is Yahoo's offering for mobile, native and search engine marketing and advertising (formerly Yahoo! Advertising and Yahoo! Search Marketing), for placing ads where visitors are, with an emphasis on mobile. The marketplace offers search and native advertising in one advertising platform, offering brand-safe premium content, and advanced technologies to deliver engaging advertising campaigns.
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.
As I've alluded to before, Yahoo Gemini! is particularly well-suited for that extra bit of marketing spend and those last few needed leads and MQLs to get you over the hump. We definitely find that the ROI is well worth it, but it's also not the type of channel that we're gonna drop half of our budget on. The scalability is limited to an extent.
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.
More robust and sophisticated reporting capacity: front end metrics are available with different granularities, but lacking in insight to guide optimization strategy
No display/programmatic buying options as yet.
Audience targeting could be improved and audience / lookalike modeling could be improved. That said, geotargeting capabilities are very good.
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.
One of my main pain points with yahoo gemini is that the product is very difficult to use and the UI seems like they took a skeleton of a similar product and made it bare bones functional for the purpose of generating ad spend. It is a huge barrier for new customers and I feel one of the main reasons they have new customers at all is all the free trial dollars they offer.
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.
They were always super helpful during training and demoing and would answer any questions we had. We didn't have a direct account manager, which would have been nice, but I just don't think their size accommodates for that type of set up. They are very knowledgeable and help guide you through a set up for each particular client.
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.
Yahoo Gemini is a more robust version of Outbrain and Taboola. It does offer mobile search, which they do not, and you have more control over your targeting, ad formats, and platform preference. Difficulty of campaign setup is pretty minimal on any Native platform, but Gemini does seem to have the least strict approval process, which is nice with both Facebook and Twitter making it difficult to target and run ads for certain products/topics.
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.
