As marketers, it’s very easy to settle into old routines when creating new campaigns. Experience is vital to success, but is the ‘we already know what works’ attitude a growth mindset? To truly optimise results, we should continually be looking for new insights that can help clients to grow their businesses. A relatively little known tool called Taboola Trends may inspire you to trial new creatives in your future campaigns.
What Can I Learn From Taboola Trends?
Taboola is a native advertising platform that has been around since 2007. If you ever browse news sites such as Sky News or the Daily Mail, you might be familiar with Taboola sponsored content on these pages.
In order to generate clicks, advertisers using Taboola have to compete with breaking news stories and current affairs. As such, the marketing tactics and advertising angles they employ need to be cutting-edge. Taboola Trends provides a treasure trove of insights that we can use for our own native and non-native campaigns.
It’s possible to get information on trends relating to specific creative categories – images, videos, keywords, topics, and title analysis.
Images
The image dashboard is regularly updated with insights on how to improve click-through rates. It’s possible to filter data by industry, language or country. There is also information related to seasonal image trends – very useful for companies that have seasonal product ranges such as fashion and food brands.
Videos
We can monitor video characteristics that are performing well on Taboola by browsing the video tab. This tool analyses all of Taboola advertisers’ most recent video uploads to determine which video characteristics are correlated with higher viewability and higher completion rates. Again, insights can be filtered – according to video length (video duration ranges from 6 to 30 seconds), or by the viewability/completion rate of the video.
Keywords & Topics
One of the most interesting and useful features in Taboola Trends is their keyword research feature. Results can be separated into 3 dashboards:
- Strong Engagement Keywords –
These keywords are correlated with a high CTR.
- Strong Competition Keywords –
These keywords are correlated with a low CTR.
- Opportunity Keywords – These are keywords that may be worth trialling. They are correlated with a high CTR but lower volumes.
In addition, refining the displayed data by industry and country will make results more relevant.
Title Analyser
If you’re looking for inspiration for advert headlines or blog title inspiration, Taboola’s Title Analyser is very handy. The results it provides are based on data gleaned from analysing the CTR from thousands of titles, so it’s a good indicator of likely success.
You simply enter a title and the predictive CTR level will be displayed.
A little less useful, the trending topics tab is decent for keeping aware of current talking points on the platform.
Summary – the view from Spike
Taboola Trends can be an important tool for marketers looking for new inspiration for their campaigns. It gives a wealth of insights that may help to improve native, social, and even paid search campaigns. We recommend heading over there with a notepad at the ready to compile your list of successes!