This article provides an overview of Taboola’s recommended creative best practices for your campaign items. Below are our best practices for creating great titles and images.

Technical Specifications at a Glance:

• Image file: 1MB maximum, jpeg preferred. (Accepted types: JPEG,  BMP, PNG, WBMP and GIF)
  • • 1000 x 600 px minimum - smaller images will serve in fewer placements
    • Aspect Ratios: 16:9 (preferred), 4:3, 1:1
• Motion Ads:
  • • File Type: .mp4, .mov, .gif. 
    • Max File Size: 50 MB (maximum 5 MB for .gif files.) 
    • Aspect Ratio: 16:9.
    • Pixel Resolution: 1067x600. 
    • Max Length: 15 Seconds. 
• Headline Character Length: 34-45 is best, 60 Characters max
• Branding Text: 30 characters maximum

Thumbnail Best Practices:

Taboola utilizes an automated cropping solution to tailor each image to customized placement sizes across Taboola’s network. For this reason, a landscape-oriented image with an aspect ratio of 16:9, 4:3, or 1:1 is best practice. A minimum width of 1000px and minimum height of 600px is required to serve on all placements.

Some other tips to make sure your image is cropped correctly:

• Choose an Image with a clear, single point of focus and a relatively plain background. Avoid images with multiple subjects or busy backgrounds to avoid anything vital being cropped out of the image.

• Avoid images that include brand logos or layers of text. These may not crop well, and end up being off-center.

Some tips for driving higher engagement from your Thumbnail images:

• Use an image where the subject of the photo is looking into the camera. This mimics the way that we use eye contact to attract attention in real life, and yields an average CTR increase of 40.2%

• If you are using your ad to sell a product, be sure to include that product in the image, as this will help to qualify shopping intent. Other advertisers who use this strategy see an average Conversion Rate increase of 11.3%.

• Use Taboola Trends to find vertical and industry specific ideas for your campaign.

Motion Ads Best Practices:

Don’t look like a banner, avoid using text, logos, overlays or heavily processed creatives.

Use slow-paced and subtle movement. Too much movement can be intrusive and banner-like, while subtle movement draws attention to your creative.

Ken Burns Effect: Add an animated transition to your static creatives in order to create an illusion of motion.

Don’t forget to choose a good fallback image according to the above image best practices: Choose a clearcut shot from your video that represents the key message of your motion ad.

Title Best Practices:

Title character limits vary across Taboola’s network depending upon the publisher configurations and placement sizes. For this reason, Taboola recommends running titles that are 60 characters or less. This will prevent your title from being cut short, which reduces the likelihood that you will get accidental clicks from users who just want to read the full title or get blocked by publishers to object to incomplete titles appearing in their feed.

For this reason, we also recommend front-loading the main point of your title, that way, in the unlikely event that your best-practice title is cut off, your audience won’t be missing vital information, such as the consequences of running a title that exceeds the character-count recommendation in the example above.

Follow all localized capitalization rules for titles in the region where your ad is running. This varies depending upon the language used in your area, so pay attention to your target market and what will resonate with the audience there.

Tips for Driving Higher Engagement from Your Ad Titles:

Word choice is your first and best tool for targeting your audience. Not only does this help to qualify your post-click experience and align the user with your KPI, but it can actually make your ad more clickable for the people you are trying to reach.

You can find more industry-specific guidelines around keyword use at Taboola Trends.

Once you have chosen the appropriate language to qualify and engage with your audience, you need to arrange those words in such a way as to create a knowledge gap, or sensation of mystery, to motivate the user to click on your ad. 

It is important to do that without misleading the user about your content, so we recommend using one of the seven common strategies below. 

Be sure to experiment with these approaches to find the right balance of CTR & CVR to meet your goals, as these strategies tend to vary in performance depending upon saturation of use and seasonality.

• Use a List to Create Familiarity with the User and Set an Expectation of the Post Click Experience: 

5 Ways You Can Write Better Titles 

• Ask a Direct Question of the User to Pique Interest and Pre-Qualify the Audience:

Do You Need to Write Better Titles? Here’s How

• Provide a Trustworthy but Definitive Benefit Statement about the Content, Product, or Brand: 

Experts Say This is the Way to Write Better Titles

•  Tell a Story with a Dangling Resolution to Draw the User In:

An Advertiser Wrote Better Titles for Their Ad & This Happened

• Use Bandwagoning to Call out the Audience and Create FOMO:

Marketers are Using This Method to Write Better Titles

• Use Low-Commitment Language to Supplement Bigger Actions:

Try This Easy Method for Writing Better Titles

• Use a Clear Call-to-Action to Drive User Intent:

Get Better Titles for Your Campaign Here 

Test multiple creatives

Test multiple title variations and images/motions ads per URL to see what works best. We recommend beginning with testing 3 titles with 3 images/motion ads.

Video

Technical Requirements:

• Media Type: MP4, MOV
• 3rd Party Tag Specifications: VAST 2.0, VAST 2.0 with VPAID 2.0 JS, VAST 3.0
• Aspect Ratios: 16:9 (preferred), 4:3, 1:1
• Video Size Limit: 150 MB
• Bitrate: >=2500 kbps
• Video length: 6-30 seconds (preferred), 90 seconds maximum

Video Creative Best Practices

• Fill the screen for a higher impact experience. Using big images in your videos are more eye-catching.
• Add subtitles to account for users watching videos with their sound off to drive more engagement.
• Use text overlays and call-to-action buttons to drive users to the end of the video or to complete an action.

Video Campaign TIPS AND TRICKS

• Test different creatives - Test two or three creatives to see what works best for your video. Consider using people, nature scenes, city scenes, and a lot of movement!
• Use the Taboola Video Studio - available to our managed service clients, to add enrichments including custom overlays, end-cards, subtitles, logos, and more to drive engagement and amplify brand awareness.
• Visit Taboola Trends for the latest video trends in your market!