I’ve heard a lot of media buyers gripe about how much they don’t like Taboola’s Backstage dashboard.

And to be honest, it really is outdated and doesn’t include a lot of the cool features you easily get with RevContent, for example.

There are two important tips to making Taboola campaigns work that some advertisers simply don’t know because there actually isn’t a lot of information about them.

Tip #1: Use dynamic subid parameters to pass through into your conversion tracking the info to know what’s converting. 

Even though Taboola has their own conversion tracking pixel (which I encourage you to include) you may also be relying on a 3rd party conversion tracking platform. I personally like <strong>Voluum</strong>. (message me if you’re looking for something like that and I can help you get setup on it.)

So what you need to do in your Taboola campaigns is add this line of subids to get the data to pass through:
campaign_id={campaign_id}&site={site}&thumbnail={thumbnail}&title={title}

If you want this information into Google Analytics, you just change what subid goes where:
utm_campaign={campaign_id}&utm_source={site}&utm_medium={thumbnail}&utm_term={title}
– depending on how you use those utm tags yourself you can customize which ones you use.

Technically utm_source should probably be “Taboola” and utm_medium should be “cpc” or “native” depending on how you categorize that internally. Use whatever ones you like, but the variables in parentheses are where Taboola will plug in their data to pass through.

• The {campaign_id} will pass through the id number of the campaign.
• The {site} will pass through the name of the PLACEMENT (very important).
• The {thumbnail} will pass through the name of the image on the ad.
• The {title} will pass through the headline of the ad.

Tip #2: You need to have an ad rep with the title of “success manager” at Taboola in order to setup “whitelisting”.

Here’s the secret to native ads working well. You run one campaign targeting the whole network as a ‘discovery’ campaign and then when you identify placements that convert, you put those into another campaign and target those exclusively. Then you block those in the discovery campaign so it keeps your ads appearing on new placements.

Once you’ve spent some money on Taboola (a few thousand bucks) running discovery campaigns you should have a list of good placements identified and you have to send those to your success manager in order to have one of your campaigns target those exclusively. The only way they say to do this is to keep sending them to your success manager, so getting in contact with them to introduce you to a success manager to do this for you is important. As always, in your discovery campaigns be blocking the placements that hit your threshold of failure so that you don’t overspend on those.