How To Set Up a New Campaign

While Realize lets you set up specific and unique campaigns, we recommend that every new campaign starts with the following standard setup.

1. Open your Realize dashboard.
2. Click +Create, then select Campaign. The New Campaign page is displayed.
3. Enter your campaign's name and add the branding text in the appropriate fields. The branding text is the site name or product you're promoting and will appear under your campaign items when they appear in Taboola placements. It's a mandatory setting. For more information on branding text, refer to this page.
4. Follow the on-screen steps to establish who you'd like to reach, when, and so on with the Marketing Objective, Scheduling, Audience Targeting, Bid Strategy, and Budget Settings. Some of these settings are mandatory, so choose those as necessary. For more information on all these settings, refer to our recommendations below. 
5. Click Continue to submit your ads for review and approval, which can take up to 24-48 hours. Refer to our content policy and review process for more details.
6. Once your ad is approved, you'll need to add items to the Campaign Inventory, including a thumbnail, headline, and website URL for the ad. Learn how to add items to a new Campaign Inventory here.

You can edit campaign settings and campaign items at any time once they're approved. Remember, review and approval after any change can take up to 24-48 hours and are done according to our content policy and review process.

Once you have set up your first campaign and have started gathering data, we recommend the following changes for maximum impact and higher success.

Our Recommendations for Your First Campaign

The goal for any campaign is to maximize your reach and attain your goals while learning more about your target audiences. Your campaign name and branding text are mandatory settings for all campaigns, but they just cover the basics. By adjusting any of the following settings, you'll increase engagement, conversions, and bring your campaign closer to your goals.

Here are some best practices we recommend for your first campaign.

Marketing Objectives

All Realize campaigns need a Marketing Objective. Realize comes with several pre-defined objectives you can use for your campaign. The platform is already configured to deliver the best possible results for each of these objectives, so you just need to choose the one that best aligns with your goals.

• Lead Generation: Drive leads, such as email signups. 
• Online Purchases: Get people to buy your products.
• Website Engagement: Increase user engagement and pageviews.
• Brand Awareness: Increase awareness of your brand
• Mobile App Installs: Get people to install your app.

The Realize platform will combine this objective with the data it gathers from the Taboola Pixel to deliver your campaign to users most suited to meet your goals. We recommend that new campaigns use whichever option is appropriate.

Scheduling Your Campaign

We recommend running your first campaign for a minimum of 7-10 days to establish a baseline for it. Otherwise, you'll not get enough data to make meaningful changes or optimizations.

By default, this option is set to start running as soon as approved and 24/7.

Location, Platform, and Device Targeting

Realize lets you target audiences based on their location, the platform, and the devices people use to access your website. You may find that audiences respond differently based on each of these.

While we explain what each of these settings does and offer specific settings, we recommend leaving them blank or setting them to the widest possible audience so you get as much data as possible from this new campaign.

• Location targeting: Choose the specific country you wish to target with your campaign. If you wish to dig even deeper, you can target as narrowly as by region/state, city, or postal code, though we recommend choosing Entire Country to test individual countries.

• Platform targeting: User behavior often changes based on the platform they're accessing your website with, so you can target different ones: Desktop computers (includes both desktop and laptops used in a single location), mobile devices, and tablets.

• Connection Type, Operating System, Browser: These settings help you narrow your target audience even further and should only be used to optimize existing campaigns or after your new campaign has run for a while.

Brand Safety Settings

There are two settings you can use to stop your campaign from appearing on specific sites or article topics, Block Sites and Brand Safety Pre-Bid.

• Block Sites: This setting stops your campaign from appearing on specific sites for performance or brand safety reasons.
• Brand Safety Pre-Bid: Use this setting to protect your brand from serving on articles that do not meet your brand safety standards, such as sensitive or inappropriate topics.

We recommend that new campaigns leave both settings clear so you can gather data to receive a site-by-site breakdown of performance in Realize and then make any bidding or blocking decisions.

Audience Targeting

Realize offers various ways to narrow your reach to specific users or articles across our network. These audiences make it easy to refine your targeting based on the audiences you've already defined in Realize (My Audiences,) Marketplace Audiences, and Contextual audiences.

We recommend that new campaigns not target specific audiences with these settings as they'll limit your reach, lead to an increase in CPC bids to make up for the reduced scale, and not give you accurate reports on your entire audience.

Note: If you do wish to target a specific audience with a new campaign, we recommend using the audience suppression setting in your Conversion settings. Learn about Audience Suppression here.

Setting a Bid and Budget

The keys to a successful campaign are an appropriate bid and budget that gets you enough clicks to generate statistically relevant data.

Your Bidding Strategy

Realize conducts an auction every time an ad placement is available for your campaign. Each auction determines which ads will be displayed at that moment in that space. Your bid enters you into the auction. Realize offers three bidding strategies: Maximize Conversions, Enhanced CPC (eCPC) and Fixed Bid.

Compare Bidding Strategies

Your Budget

If you are optimizing towards conversions:

• When using Maximize Conversions, your minimum budget should reflect your conversion rate and CPA goal. We strongly recommend a daily budget of 10X the CPA goal in order to complete the learning phase and get to stable performance quickly. Learn more
• When using Enhanced CPC or Fixed Bid, we recommend to start with a minimum daily budget of 5X your CPA goal and a minimum monthly budget of 150X your CPA goal.

For campaigns not optimizing towards conversions:

• Ideally your budget should be enough to cover your CPC rates and encourage high engagement to start with. We recommend that new campaigns aim for a minimum of 100-200 clicks per day. That means entering a budget equal to your bid multiplied by the number of clicks. E.g., for a $0.50 CPC bid, you'd need to enter a daily budget of $50-100 to meet the 100-200 daily clicks.

Campaign Inventory

All campaigns must have an ad associated with them, including a thumbnail, headline, and website. Learn how to set this up for your new campaign here.

We recommend that new campaigns run between 3-10 ads per campaign to generate sufficient data. Our algorithm will test the ads and optimize traffic towards those that perform best. Learn more about our ad best practices here and how to update campaign items here.

You can also add optional ad elements like CTA Buttons or Ad Descriptions to enhance your ads. Before adding your ad content, click here to read more about our content policy and review process.

Explore More Campaign Options

Discover even more campaign options and learn how to optimize an existing campaign here.