Targeting Audience Segments – Taboola Advertiser Help Center

To drive the best performance possible for your campaigns, Taboola provides audience targeting options based on interest, behavior, demographics, business and buying intent (note: varies by market)

This allows you to focus your spend on audiences you know you want to target or audiences who are most interested in buying your product or services.

Unique to Taboola is the Audience Insights report. This actionable report allows you to make smart targeting decisions based on an audience's predicted ability to drive the highest ROI.

This article will review how to access the Audience Insights report to find the best audiences to target. Then, it will review how to set up a campaign to target these top performing audience segments.

How to Access Audience Segment Reporting

To access reporting, take the following steps:

Go to the Campaign Summary page. Note you must be running a Run of Network (RON) campaign to access the Audience Insights Reports.
Select the relevant campaign you’d like to see the audience segments for.
(Optional) In the top right corner, select the date range you want to view.
At the top of the report, select the By Audience tab. On the By Audience tab, you will be able to see relevant performance metrics like impressions, clickthrough rate (CTR) and conversion rate, shown by audience segment, collected over the timeframe you selected. In the report you’ll also see what partner from our extensive inventory is providing each audience segment in the Partner Name column.
Suggested Audience Segments- You will see a column called Conversion Rate vs. Average. Audience segments can be sorted by recommendation strength, with the strongest recommendation highlighted in green, and the weakest (but still positive) recommendation in orange. These are the Audience Segments most likely to perform for your campaign.

Very Important note!

Every user in the Taboola network can be part of many segments of users. For example, someone might fall into the “Male,” “Business Professional,” and “Pet Owner” categories.

As a result, clicks and actions from one user can show up in multiple segments in the By Audience report. Therefore, the data in the report will add up to more than the total clicks/spend/actions in the campaign.
If you do not see the "Conversion rate vs average", make sure it is not turned off in the customize columns feature.

*For Taboola Pixel clients, the field may be hidden by default, it can be found by selecting it in the columns tab. For a how to click here.

Not all campaigns will get a recommendation. If you see a blank in the cell for that audience segment in the "Conversion rate vs average" column, it means there is not enough data to form a prediction or the segment may not perform well for the campaign.

If a specific campaign does not have any recommended segments, you should consider: changing up the campaign creatives, using more lenient targeting to reach more users, increasing the budget, or tracking more valuable post click actions using the Taboola Pixel to increase the overall amount of actions captured.

How to Create Campaigns Targeting Specific Audiences

There are two ways to launch a new audience targeted campaign:

Important note!

We recommend to select a campaign that has a spending history of at least two weeks at $50/day and is running on all the Taboola network without many restrictions (for example, is running only on specific sites or targeting only one region), in order to have enough data to predict the best performing audiences for you.

Create Campaign From The By Audience Report

This option allows you to duplicate the run of network (RON) campaign and add the selected/desired audience segments. This option is best if you wish to create an audience targeted campaign that is strongly predicted to perform well based on data from the RON campaign.

In order to create a campaign from the By Audience report, do the following:

Go to the By Audience tab in the Campaign Summary page.
Select the RON campaign you’d like to create a new campaign from (in other words, the campaign you will copy with the exception of the audience segment targeting).
Review the Conversion Rate to Avg. column to identify the strongest audiences for your campaign goals.
Tick check boxes of the audiences you would like to target

Important note!
Each data provider will need their own campaign, you cannot combine multiple providers in one campaign.
Click on Duplicate using Audiences
You’ll reach the New Campaign page, which will include all of the settings from your original campaign, including the audience segments you’ve selected to target.

Expert Tip!
Targeting audience segments will most likely decrease the number of users are able to see this campaign. In the settings page of your new campaign, your CPC will be adjusted to the minimal CPC recommended to maintain scale. We recommend that the CPC be at least 10-20% higher
Make any necessary changes to the rest of your campaign settings, and click Continue. Then you will be able to edit campaign items in your campaign if needed.

Create A Campaign From The Campaign Management Page

While it is recommended to build audience campaigns based on data from your existing campaigns, sometimes you already know what audiences you’d like to target.

In order to create a campaign from the Campaign Management page, do the following:

Go to the Campaign Management page
Click +New Campaign
Under the Campaign Targeting section, select the country that you wish your campaign to run in

Warning!
the country targeting affects which audiences will be available, as not all partners provide audience segment data in all locations.
Select Audience Segments under Audience subsection.
Type in the name of the audience segment or data type keyword in the drop down field to select the right segment or narrow your search.
Once you select audiences, Taboola users who are in at least one of these audiences will be targeted.

You can edit your Audience Segment targeting at any time by returning to the Edit Campaign page.

Audience Segment Targeting Best Practices

Keep Run-Of-Network Campaigns Running: One of the main benefits of audience segment targeting is the ability to access audience segment data in any Taboola campaign in the By Audience tab of Campaign Summary. To maintain your reach as well as the ability to continually optimize your data-targeted campaign you should continue your RON campaigns. This way you will stay informed… Maintain run-of-network, wide-reaching campaigns in order to stay informed about which audiences are engaging or converting most efficiently with your content. Let the data speak for itself.

Raise Your Audience Targeting CPC: As with any granular targeting functionality, focusing your campaign on a specific audience greatly reduces your potential scale. In order to maintain scale on campaigns when targeting specific audiences, it is strongly recommended to run these campaigns with a higher CPC bid than your run-of-network campaigns.

Audience Segment FAQs

In which countries are audience segments available?

Audience segments are available globally. However, available providers and audiences will vary on a country by country basis. When you select a country to target in your campaign, the audiences available for that country will automatically populate under Audience Segments.

Can I combine audiences from different data providers?

Right now, it is not possible to target audience segments from multiple providers in the same campaign. You can create multiple campaigns as needed to cover multiple providers.

There are a few things to keep in mind.

If you do not see the "Conversion rate vs average", make sure it is not turned off in the customize columns feature.

For Taboola Pixel clients, the field may be hidden by default, it can be found by selecting it in the columns tab.

Make sure you've set the right conversions to be included in your totals column as this is the data we will use to make your recommendations.