The old saying, “Waste not, want not” was not written about digital ads, but it is still relevant to how marketers promote their products online. No matter the size of your advertising budget and no matter the nature of your goals, reducing ad waste to create more profitable campaigns is crucial to long-term business success.
Many marketers rely on artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms to identify wasted impressions and make improvements. With more than 40% of total digital ad spend wasted, businesses are eager to make a change.
But there’s a problem: AI doesn’t always provide the perfect solution, tailored to your needs. As a marketer, only you know what’s best for your brand.
That’s why it’s imperative to test, optimize and apply campaign results for future decisions.
Why it’s important to reduce ad waste
With profitable advertising, Taboola is constantly evolving our technology to improve the performance of our advertisers. One of the ways we’ve tackled waste and gotten results is by creating Maximize Conversions, a fully automated bidding strategy and optimization tool that puts advertisers in control of their campaigns.
With an adoption rate of 60% and an average reduction in CPAs (cost per action) of 15%, we are seeing great results. Powered by SmartBid, our core machine learning algorithm, this tool automatically optimizes bids to drive as many conversions as possible within a predefined budget or CPA target. So if you’re optimizing for customer journey actions measured in Taboola Ads, such as leads, purchases, app installs, or page views, this is your role.
Learn more about how to reduce ad waste
Add SpendGuard Algo to the mix
To increase transparency for our brand partners, we make our algorithm decisions visible to all users, both by showing how and where we limit ad spend and by blocking certain publishers to help protect your budget. We call this tool SpendGuard, and it’s a key feature of our algorithm designed to reduce wasted spend, save you time, and ensure trust and confidence in the Taboola brand.
Think of it as a window into what the AI is doing. You can see the decisions being made so you know exactly how your budget is being spent. By limiting or blocking publishers that show signs of wasteful spending and consolidating the efforts of previous tools’ “behind-the-scenes” features, SpendGuard protects your ad budget on the Taboola network to grow your ad dollars from the start .
Learn about custom rules
Our commitment to reducing ad waste doesn’t end there. We know that advertisers like to stay in control, especially on the open web, and that includes securing placements on the right publisher sites and fine-tuning ad delivery for maximum performance. This is where custom rules come into play, a perfect partner to maximize conversions
Custom Rules is an optimization tool that allows you to set your own automated rules on campaigns and protect your spend according to your logic. Advertisers can automate optimizations by enabling rules created according to your custom conditions, and you can enable these rules for both websites and ad messages.
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How it works
To understand custom rules a little better, let’s use an example of a classic stop/loss rule. An advertiser can create a custom rule that, based on their own custom conditions, will trigger a block on a publisher if their campaign has spent more than a certain amount without generating any conversions. This is a clear indication that we should encourage the algorithm to explore other posts to improve the results.
In other words, custom rules allow advertisers to adjust your automated campaigns and daily optimizations to meet specific business goals, leading to more successful advertising results and saving you valuable time. The recent addition of even more features makes it easy to tailor your campaigns to meet your needs; for example, advertisers now have more visibility into website and ad reports, access to a “bulk undo” option for deleted rules, the ability to duplicate rules, and an extended lookback option from 60 to 90 days .
With less manual work, you can achieve superior results. And in a world where it’s important to find the right balance between artificial intelligence and human oversight, what could be better than that?
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Custom Rules Success Stories
Even with all the data at your fingertips, it can sometimes be hard to imagine how tools like these can benefit your brand. Let’s hear from some marketers who have tried custom rules for themselves and take a look at their results.
“With Taboola’s new custom rules feature, we’ve found the perfect balance to block sites after a specific threshold of clicks and zero conversions. The results speak for themselves: our campaigns are now more targeted, efficient and profitable. A notable success was a recent Maximum Conversions campaign where we implemented rules to block sites with zero conversions. In just four days, our ROAS (Return on Advertising Investment) experienced a noticeable uptick, which automatically turned positive.” —Veronica Almonte, Senior Director of Performance Marketing, System1
“This feature is amazing and works exactly as I expected. It saves me a lot of manual work and time.” —Valentin Kuznetsov, Senior UA Manager, Volka Games
“With an enterprise-wide focus on automation, custom rules have become an integral part of our optimization strategy at Taboola, delivering tangible time-saving benefits. By automating ad optimization, we can maximize efficiency and achieve performance gains, especially during periods when manual intervention is not feasible..” —Calum McAuley, Senior Director of Performance Marketing, MVF
Want to try the custom rules for yourself? Check out our top tips to help you reduce ad waste by leveraging the power of Taboola Ads technology.