To everyone saying Native Ads (Taboola, Outbrain etc.) only buys you s**t traffic
I ran a small experiment because I keep seeing the same claim:
“Taboola is just low-quality traffic.”
Yes, the budget here is very small. I know. This is not a Harvard study and I’m not pretending it is.
But the screenshot still shows something pretty simple:
You can buy traffic from well-known, high-quality publishers from day one.
Not after burning through half your budget. Not after blocking 300 random sites manually. From the beginning.
But you actually need to set things up properly.
A lot of people launch a campaign with basically no structure, no rules, no real placement strategy and then act surprised when the traffic is not perfect.
Which is a bit like leaving your front door open and then complaining that someone walked in.
One way to control this is through rules.
For example, you can build rules around site names (or words like "push" within site names).
If you already know certain sites are not relevant for your offer, you can exclude those site names automatically instead of waiting until they spend your money.
You can also build rules based on performance.
For example:
If a site reaches a certain number of impressions and the CTR is below X%, block it automatically. Or if the CTR is really really high but but CVR low!
Or you can create rules based on clicks, spend, conversions or whatever actually makes sense for the campaign.
The important part is not just copying some random rule from a Reddit post.
You need to think about it from a media buying perspective first.
How much data do you need before blocking something?
Should the rule be based on impressions, CTR, clicks, spend or conversions?
Does it make sense to apply it across the whole account or only to one campaign?
You can set this up on account level if the logic should apply more broadly, or on campaign level if you need something more specific.
And yes, speaking with the platform before launching can also help. They can even add standard rules to your account if you have no clue which rules would makes sense for you.
Wild concept, I know.
Sometimes asking the platform team about inventory, setup and campaign structure before spending money is slightly more useful than calling the whole channel garbage afterwards.
So no, Native Ads does not automatically mean shit traffic.
It usually just means you need a better setup.
Feel free to DM me if you wanna know how I approach publisher quality, rules and campaign structure.
Small disclaimer: this is one example, not a performance promise. Results can vary and yes, you can still lose money. This post is not sponsored, approved or supported by Taboola, any publisher or basically anyone.
P.S. You may notice two conversions in the conversion column, but none of them happened on the large publisher sites shown in the screenshot.
A bit of context before someone starts doing forensic analysis on a campaign with almost no spend:
Those conversions were clickout events, not purchases. The campaign was promoting a ClickBank affiliate offer, so the tracked conversion was someone clicking through from the page to the actual offer.
No purchases happened yet, which with this budget is not exactly shocking.
In the last columns, however, you can also see engagement events. These included things like users staying on the page for at least 30 seconds.
So these were not just disappearing clicks where someone instantly closed the tab. People actually engaged with the page, even though the offer was fairly complex and the landing page contained a lot of text.
Would I call this proof that the campaign is profitable? Obviously not.
But it does show that the traffic was not completely useless either.