Maximize the efficiency of your Taboola campaigns according to your own custom conditions
Content:
Custom Rules is a feature in Taboola Ads that offers additional controls for you to take as part of your optimization strategy. Custom Rules offer the ability for any user to set their own automated rules on campaigns that will make a change when a condition is met. This can be activated for sites, ads and campaigns.
To get notifications about actions triggered by your Custom Rules, you need to set up a Scheduled Report.
How To Use Custom Rules
If you want to create a new Custom Rule and set up reporting:
1. Navigate to the ‘Rules’ tab in Taboola Ads.
2. Click on ‘+ New Rule’.
3. Name the rule.
4. Set up conditions and outcomes for the rule based on your own logic.
5. Roll out ‘Advanced Settings’.
6. Switch on the toggle next to ‘Include this rule in a scheduled report’.
7. If you have an existing scheduled report and want to add custom rules actions to it, choose from the existing reports using the dropdown list.
8. If you don’t have any scheduled report, create a new one by ticking ‘Create a new report’.
9. Click on ‘Next’ to save changes.
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If you want to schedule a report for an existing Custom Rule:
1. Navigate to the ‘Reports’ tab.
2. Create a new report or edit an existing Custom Rules report.
3. Choose Custom Rules that you want to include in the report from the ‘Rules’ dropdown menu.
4. Click on ‘Save’ to save changes.
How to Use Custom Rules to Prevent Wasted Spend
Custom Rules can be used as a stop/loss solution, meaning that you can trigger a site to be blocked or an ad to be paused based on your custom conditions that you've set.
- Based on Custom Rules for the Sites dimension, you can block sites that do not serve right to the campaign's goals. Compared to using a block list or manually blocking sites, Custom Rules allow you to block publishers almost in real-time in an automated manner, saving time and preventing wasted spending. For example, If impressions greater than 1000 and vCTR more than 10% then block sites:
- Based on Custom Rules for the Ads dimension, advertisers can pause ads that consume a portion of the budget without delivering the desired results. Instead, advertisers can use Custom Rules to automatically pause underperforming ads, allowing the budget to be redistributed to more successful ads. For example, if CPA greater than $5 and CVR less than 10% then pause ads (to pause an underperforming ad within a campaign with multiple ads):
How to Use Custom Rules to Automate Budget Changes
Custom Rules can also be used to reduce manual and repetitive budget monitoring and adjustments, automatically scale profitable campaigns, and tighten the budget for unprofitable ones.
Based on Custom Rules for the Campaigns dimension, advertisers can scale profitable campaigns and limit unprofitable ones. For example, if CPA from ‘Purchases’ is less than $5, then increase budget by 20% but not exceeding $250 per day.
You can create a rule from scratch or choose one of the following templates:
- ‘Increase the budget of the successful campaigns’
- ‘Decrease the budget of underperforming campaigns’
Both templates base the rule on the CPA value and Spend.
The default setting for Increase Daily Budget By is 20%, but you can also choose to enter a specific amount of money instead.
The Cap Daily Budget option makes sure that, even with automatic changes to the budget, the total amount spent won’t go over the set limit.
For Action Frequency, you can choose to change the budget once a week, once a month, or use Auto Frequency.
Do’s and Don’ts for Custom Rules
Do’s |
Don’ts |
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1. Carefully review in Rules Preview your rules before saving to ensure you're happy with the actions it's going to take. 2. Be realistic with your goals. Base your rules on average performance on Taboola or at least similar performance from other platforms. 3. Identify repetitive manual tasks and replace them with Custom Rules to enhance efficiency. For example, if you review your campaign once a day and then block ads, sites, or adjust your budget based on your own criteria, utilize those conditions into a Custom Rule. 4. Leverage different conversion events to strategically optimize across the funnel. 5. Utilize the ROAS metric, where possible; not all rules have to be CPA related. 6. Use Scheduled Reports to ensure transparency and visibility regarding the actions performed by Custom Rules. |
1. Don’t build account level rules if you have campaigns working towards different benchmarks or goals. - Avoid rules that are too simplistic (and result in aggressive and/or undesired blocks): - Include more than one condition, e.g, block a site after 0 conversions AND $100 spent - Consider different time frames using the ‘AND’ logic, e.g. excluding last 3 days - Consider excluding historically strong performing or quality sites - such as Yahoo - that you would rarely consider blocking regardless of performance - Consider excluding recent time frames for conversions that are often delayed (e.g. offline sales or in-app purchases). 2. Don’t rely on unblocking sites and ads after the rule has been activated. If you’re reversing actions that the Custom Rules have taken, don’t forget to adapt the existing rule to make sure it doesn’t happen again. E.g. When unblocking a site or ad, it’s likely it will be blocked again based on the custom rule configuration. 3. Don’t be too aggressive from the offset. For newer campaigns on Taboola, we recommend monitoring performance for 1-2 weeks before creating rules to avoid limiting performance. |
How to Control Custom Rules Changes
Pre-launch
Advertisers can see the actions that the rule will take before they save it, using our rule preview functionality. This step shows which campaigns will be affected by the rule and cannot be skipped.
Post-launch
The Rules Actions and Change History tabs both provide visibility into the actions of rules, enabling an in-depth understanding of the rules' impact on optimizations, overall performance, and scale.
To get notifications about actions triggered by active Custom Rules, advertisers need to set up a Scheduled Report.
FAQ
Q: Is it possible to apply Custom Rules to a single campaign or a group of campaigns?
A: Yes, you can add or remove campaigns from a rule when editing the existing rule or creating a new one.
Q: If I have multiple rules will they be applied following ‘OR’ logic or ‘AND’ logic?
A: They will follow ‘AND’ logic, meaning that multiple rules will be triggered if all their conditions are met.
Q: Can I duplicate a rule or create a rule at the network level?
A: At the moment, we do not support this functionality.
Q: How many conditions can I add to one rule?
A: You can add up to 5 conditions to one rule.