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 report to find the best audiences to target. Then, it will review how to set up a campaign to target these top performing audiences.
How to Access Audience 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 audiences 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 Audiences - You will see a column called Conversion Rate vs. Average. Audiences 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 Audiences most likely to perform for your campaign.
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:
Create Campaign From The By Audience Report
This option allows you to duplicate the run of network (RON) campaign and add the selected/desired audiences. 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 audiences you’ve selected to target.
Expert Tip!Targeting audiences 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 Marketplace Audiences under Audience subsection.
- Search for available audiences by Category, Subcategory, Provider, or search by keyword and select the right segment.
- 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 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.
Audiences FAQs
In which countries are audiences available?
Audiences 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 Marketplace Audiences.
Can I combine audiences from different data providers?
Yes.
For Sponsored Content campaigns, in the marketplace audiences UI, if you select an audience from a provider that doesn’t support “multi-partner”, adding audience segments from other providers will be disabled. Vice versa, if you select an audience from a provider that does support multi-partner, providers that don’t support it will be disabled for selection.
For Video campaigns, you can target multiple segments from the below providers within a single campaign:
- Bombora
- Connexity
- Neustar
- Specialist Marketing Services
- WeatherAlpha
- Taboola
- Webbula
How do I know the size of the segment I'm targeting?
In the Audience Targeting section of Edit Campaign in Backstage, you can view the size of your marketplace audiences (third party data and Taboola Audiences) on Sponsored Content campaigns. The Audience Size shows the estimated number of people in an audience daily, averaged over the last 28 days. The size will appear next to the provider name as seen below in two examples. The estimated size includes the selected countries, but does not include other campaign restrictions such as blocked publishers, platform etc.
Important notes!
If audience size couldn't be retrieved (due to a technical issue), you will see "couldn't retrieve size". Any size below 100K will be shown as "<100K". These audiences are not recommended for targeting as they are expected to yield very low scale.
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.
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. Try increasing the date window to at least 30 days.
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.