Skip to main content
TrustRadius
Taboola

Taboola

Overview

What is Taboola?

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,…

Read more
Recent Reviews

TrustRadius Insights

Taboola has become an essential tool for digital marketers looking to expand their reach and connect with a wider audience. Through …
Continue reading

Traffic, traffic, traffic.

7 out of 10
February 13, 2018
Taboola is a native advertising platform that I've used to reach top of funnel traffic effectively and on the cheap. You can expect to pay …
Continue reading
Read all reviews

Reviewer Pros & Cons

View all pros & cons
Return to navigation

Pricing

View all pricing

Campaigns

$10.00

Cloud
Starting Price Per Day

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Return to navigation

Product Demos

Investor Day 2022: Newsroom Demo

YouTube
Return to navigation

Product Details

What is Taboola?

Taboola is a cloud-based, AI-driven native advertising platform — from the global company of the same name headquartered in New York City — known for publishing "recommended" content in a variety of popularly visited news sites and digital properties. Taboola is partnered with many publishers such as TIME, NBC, Business Insider, Yahoo, USA Today, CBS News, MSN, The Independent and BBC Global News. Taboola is used by big brand advertisers, performance marketers, affiliate marketers and others for its massive global reach and ability to drive conversions.

Taboola Video

Demo - Taboola Feed

Taboola Technical Details

Deployment TypesSoftware as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo

Frequently Asked Questions

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.).

Meta Business Suite, Google Ads, and Outbrain are common alternatives for Taboola.

Reviewers rate Support Rating highest, with a score of 2.9.

The most common users of Taboola are from Small Businesses (1-50 employees).
Return to navigation

Comparisons

View all alternatives
Return to navigation

Reviews and Ratings

(28)

Community Insights

TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!

Taboola has become an essential tool for digital marketers looking to expand their reach and connect with a wider audience. Through running display native campaigns, users have been able to target and engage users who may not have otherwise been exposed to their ads. This has proven particularly useful for social media teams who are keen on managing social media accounts and utilizing various digital marketing tools to maximize their reach. By leveraging Taboola, they have successfully expanded their readership and achieved greater visibility.

One of the strengths of Taboola lies in its ability to curate news articles for promotion across its platform. This feature enables marketers to effectively drive top-of-funnel traffic at cost-effective CPM rates, often below $1. Additionally, retargeting users on Taboola's platform can be done with CPM rates ranging between $1-3. The self-serve platform is complemented by responsive and well-trained support from Taboola, ensuring that marketers receive the assistance they need to optimize their campaigns.

The platform also tackles the challenge of addressing 2nd-tier quality web traffic by providing valuable insights into ad clickers' demographics. This information allows marketers to refine their targeting strategies and ensure that their content is reaching the most relevant audience. Moreover, Taboola serves as a recommendation tool that helps create high-quality and engaging content with a global reach. Through this functionality, it has proven itself as a revenue driver on websites, benefiting marketing and client programs departments alike.

With its ability to drive users with similar interests to content, Taboola has emerged as an effective means of increasing engagement. Marketing and search teams have utilized the platform to promote specific content and drive traffic to websites successfully. Additionally, Taboola's collaboration with partners allows for personalized recommendations based on user interests and reading habits, further enhancing the user experience.

Furthermore, the insights provided by trends.taboola.com offer valuable information not only for Taboola users but also for other networks. Marketers can gain valuable industry insights and trends that can inform their strategies beyond the Taboola platform.

In summary, Taboola offers a range of powerful use cases for marketers, enabling them to expand their reach, curate content, target specific audiences, and drive engagement. The platform's effectiveness, combined with its user-friendly interface and responsive support, has made it an indispensable tool in the digital marketing landscape.

Easy-to-use Interface: Many users have praised Taboola for its easy-to-use interface, stating that it is intuitive and simple to navigate. With this user-friendly design, managing campaigns becomes a seamless process, allowing users to easily access the features they need.

Great Customer Service: Several reviewers have expressed their appreciation for the excellent customer service provided by Taboola. Users have reported that the account representatives are responsive and quick to assist with any questions or issues that arise. This level of support helps users feel valued and supported as they navigate the platform.

Custom Targeting Feature: The custom targeting feature offered by Taboola has received positive feedback from numerous customers. This functionality enables users to reach their specific target audience effectively, ensuring their ads are shown to top-of-funnel traffic. By providing this capability, Taboola empowers marketers with the tools needed to optimize campaign performance and achieve desired results.

Difficulty in Excluding Irrelevant Sites: Some users have expressed frustration with the lack of an easy way to exclude irrelevant sites and bid on specific sites only. This has hindered their ability to effectively target their desired audience and optimize their campaigns.

Uneven Performance Across Campaigns: Multiple reviewers have reported experiencing uneven performance across campaigns, with only a few news articles performing well and consuming a large portion of the budget. This inconsistency has made it challenging for users to achieve consistent results and allocate their resources effectively.

Lack of Performance Whitelisting: Several users have mentioned the absence of performance whitelisting as a drawback. Without this feature, it becomes difficult for them to identify the best traffic sources and optimize their campaigns accordingly.

Based on user reviews, the following recommendations have been made for Taboola:

Users recommend reaching out to an account representative at the beginning to obtain a whitelist of placements.

They also suggest diversifying ad providers and not relying solely on Taboola.

Users advise reviewing the pricing structure to ensure it aligns with the brand's budget and goals.

It is important to keep the customer first and prioritize their needs.

Some users believe that the quality of support and integration for new enterprise customers can be improved.

Users recommend spending time filtering placements to achieve the desired quality of traffic.

Unique tracking parameters should be used for each headline/image combination.

Staying in touch with Taboola account managers and support people is recommended, along with providing feedback.

Users have had different experiences with Taboola, with some strongly advising against using it, while others describe their partnership as responsive and good.

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-4 of 4)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are using Taboola to drive curation of new articles and generate more traffic on the site. Taboola is one of our partners whom we send data and they provide recommendation to the user based on Article they are reading or they are interested in. We using their services across entire site.
  • Advertise
  • Recommendation
  • Curation
  • Customer interest
  • Defensive check on their API
  • API response time
  • Look and feel of their curation module
Well:
It provided good recommendation as curation function on the site to the customer and solves User needs on interested topic they want to read. It is also good to generate traffic on the site by advertising.
Less:
Needs to improve on lazy loading and looks and feel of their curation module design.
  • Content Recommendation
  • Trending Now
  • Asset Curation
  • Get more monetization
  • Generate more traffic to get more ROI
  • Provide Trending Now content on more highly viewed articles
I was not involved in the decision to select Taboola but overall it stands out from their competitor based on Price, Communication, Market Values, Customer Base, Technology and IT, Optimization, Monetization they have in current market. Their feed is widely used across Media and it gives better ROI for industry. It is solving our need and it is win-win situation for both of us.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Taboola is used by our SEM team to run display/native campaigns to target a wider audience. It helps us target users that we otherwise would not be able to show ads.
  • Custom targeting
  • Remarketing
  • Easy to use user interface
  • Great customer service
  • I would like to see an easier way to exclude irrelevant sites that our ads received impressions or clicks on.
  • Being able to bid on specific sites only.
I think Taboola is great for either lead gen or for shopping product sites. I would definitely have a full-time person running the campaigns. If not managed properly, things can get out of hand with costs going up and conversion rates dropping.
  • Helped get more leads.
  • Positive ROI.
We saw lower CPCs on Taboola when running a cost per click campaign. We also had a better conversion rate.
Support on Taboola has been great. We have always been in constant communication with their team and they have answered all of our questions and helped us when we had any issues or concerns.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Taboola as a recommendation tool, as it was originally intended. We strive to create high-quality content that engages our readers, and Taboola has an ever-growing reach all over the world. The invaluable insight that trends.taboola.com provides can be useful for other networks as well. It provides a glimpse into what humans currently like to click on.
  • A good value on clicks -- they have visitors for all CPCs!
  • Worldwide reach and relatability -- so many providers use Taboola. It's very easy to reach your audience wherever.
  • High quality -- their policies ensure that only enjoyable, modest content is provided.
  • Account managers -- some of them underestimate the effort that goes into creating the creatives and the landing pages, and suggest abandoning them instead of helping (with a simple instruction of a few words) to make them acceptable.
  • Strict content policies and human preferences being mixed up. Inconsistency sometimes sneaks into the review process.
  • Deleting campaigns created in error -- with a bin function even! That would be great.
I recommend you read their extensive policy, and decide if their conditions and your needs match. I cannot give specific scenarios, as Taboola is mainly what you make of it. It all depends on what you want to show and to whom. The targeting isn't nearly as precise as on Google's or Facebook's network, so if you want to sell dog coats to local chihuahua owners, you probably won't love Taboola, but you might!
  • That would be confidential information. The taboo I promised in the title is here, yes.
The unpredictability of rejections and the roadblocks connected to that take a lot of the glory away that comes with ease of use, and how they fixed a lot of bugs and mistakes that were causing problems some months ago. I still lack the function to push my campaigns around, sort them into categories, and so on.
We had some awesome customer support/account manager experiences, but lately we are having issues -- not only me, but coworkers too. The technical part is working fine, the implementation of the content policy and the lack of support for mysterious rejections is really discouraging lately. They surely have a hard time managing campaigns that target the whole world in trying hard not to offend anyone, but repeating the same meaningless instruction is really not supportive.
Taboola is the middle ground between the two. Policy ensures that only quality content and creatives are distributed, but they aren't extremely strict about what kind of content can be shown. Brax isn't in the list, but it is a great supplementary tool for Taboola. However, it's up to you if you think it works well for your organization!
Devina Heriyanto | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Taboola is used by my company's social media team -- which handles all social media accounts and other digital marketing tools needed to reach out more readers. As a member of the social media team, I am currently responsible for managing Taboola for the company. My responsibility ranges from targeting the audience to curating the news articles that we want to promote across Taboola's platform.
  • Taboola's network is made up of high-quality websites that are similar to our own. This means that we can attract high-quality readers and that the impressions are not wasted on just any other internet user.
  • The pricing is great. There are two bidding systems: smart and fixed bidding so that you can choose according to your need and budget, of course.
  • Related to the first point: since the users are high-quality, they spend more time on your website and end up reading more pages. When you consider this, Taboola's pricing is way cheaper than other similar platforms.
  • Easy to use dashboard. The dashboard puts everything you need to know upfront, from CPC, spending, and results.
  • Uneven performance across one campaign. I usually curate 10 to 15 news articles to be promoted in Taboola, and usually, only two or three perform really well and eat up a huge piece of the budget. Sometimes you have to separate contents into different campaigns so that you'll have more even performance.
  • Since Taboola caters to all kind of websites, it is sometimes hard for news media to compete and follow their content best practice. It takes a while to have a grasp on what kind of contents perform well on Taboola.
  • Also, being a news website, we have varying contents including that which is related to pornography or violence. Sometimes Taboola doesn't allow us to promote these kinds of contents, even though the materials do not promote pornography or violence.
Taboola is well suited when you want to reach out new audience and you have a grasp on what kind of audience you want. Taboola allows you to choose where your promoted contents will be displayed and where they should not (blacklist and whitelist), hence you have the ability to target an audience from similar websites.

I personally use Taboola to promote contents that have longer shelf-life, because it takes a while for a content to perform on Taboola. If you're on tight schedule, you might want to tinker your spending setting on each campaign.
  • Taboola guarantees stable user flow across the campaign period. I use balanced spending setting on my campaign so that the budget is well spread throughout the month, but usually, the traffic is higher nearing the end of the campaign.
  • New users and more awareness. Taboola allows us to reach potential readers without much hassle.
  • Users from Taboola are a high-quality audience who spend a lot of time on your website and read several pages. Unlikely to be bots.
I tried Outbrain for a month just to compare the two platforms. The result is: Outbrain has similar CPC to Taboola, but the audience is low-quality. They don't spend much time on the website and only read the promoted content without continuing to other pages. In the long run, Outbrain's pricing is far more expensive than Taboola.

Also, Taboola's dashboard is easier to use.
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.
No
Our budget is in US$ and there was a time when we had to press our budget on Taboola since our domestic currency was performing badly. I asked for a lower CPC from the Taboola support team and they agreed to it for the sake of good business, since we had been using Taboola for over a year. This had convinced me to keep using Taboola for the future.
Return to navigation