Taboola is a native advertising platform from the company of the same name in New York for publishing "recommended" content in a variety of popularly visited news sites and spaces. Taboola is partnered with many publishers (the Atlantic, Tribune, MailOnline, Business Insider, etc.).
$10
Starting Price Per Day
Vungle
Score 8.0 out of 10
N/A
Vungle headquartered in San Francisco offers their eponymous mobile in-app advertising technology platform.
If you want to have your company advertised on news websites across the United States then Taboola is perfect. If you're looking for clicks and impressions but not so much interested in traffic that is highly engaged and converting often then I'd suggest Taboola as an option to run traffic, too. This is the perfect platform for grey-hat offers and similar ideas. I wouldn't suggest it for running ads on your website due to some strict conditions and the fact that it might not necessarily play nice with traffic coming from Facebook.
Vungle works well for branding and performance as video is a high impact format that and that has good CTRs and CVRs. However, for advertisers without a lot of budget, Vungle may not be a good option as the CPMs on the exchange are very high. For branding there are alternatives that have a more developed product, where video can be targeted near content the user may like, like Teads.
It was pretty straightforward getting an account set up and having an account rep assigned. Compared to some other platforms Taboola is actually rather intuitive when it comes to navigating the user interface. Pixel implementation was easy and we didn't have any discrepancies tracking conversions. Also the ability to target LALs was very useful and semi-straightforward to upload.
I would say is a standard video SSP. The reporting dashboard is well designed and easy to use and throttling options are standard. They seem to be confident about their inventory and they don't really evolve their product and add new betas or create audiences or do anything out of the ordinary.
We have a point of contact in Taboola and he has been really great in supporting our campaign. He helped us set up the initial campaign, answered our questions related to the campaign and even agreed when I asked for a lower CPC. Also, while he tried to encourage us to spend more, he never pushed us to the point that it gets annoying.
Their support team is a bit slow. You have to re-send your email questions constantly because the first email never gets a reply. Their core business is still the ad network which does not involve a lot of human interaction so they are still working on how to evolve their account management team to be an exchange.
Outbrain doesn't charge a fee for automatic credit card billing. Often Outbrain CPC for the same content is cheaper but not always. The Outbrain UX is not as good as Taboola but recent changes had made them better than they used to be. In Outbrain you can not change images or titles once they are submitted. You also can not clone campaigns which you can do with Taboola
Vungle stands out as the only video only exchange. It is their main selling point and they have carved out a nice niche that differentiates them from the rest of SSPs. Their main competition, in my opinion, is Teads, which has focused the product more towards branding in order to monetize better for its publishers by getting higher bids.
Taboola campaigns have had positive effects on top of funnel activities and engagement metrics though the traffic is not always as qualified as one would like. You will need to carefully tailor your campaign to squeeze out the most relevant traffic.
