Putting some money behind native ads was one of initiatives I cooked up for raising awareness about Names & Faces over the summer. After exploratory calls with a couple, we decided to try Taboola.
Their proposition is that you can ‘reach your customers on the websites they love’. We had a little help from the sales rep and account manager but with the option we chose it was mostly up to us to set everything up.
With our love of AB testing, we ended up launching campaigns on mobile and desktop (25/75 split) with three destinations:
- our homepage
- a landing page about knowing people being hard
- a landing page 5 reasons it pays to know your coworkers
We developed a bunch of different ads – copy and CTA free – as the bait for people to click on. I stop short of calling what we did clickbait but will be honest that it felt a little that way.
With all of the ads, destination URLS, and headlines I came up with, we ended up with a pretty long matrix of combinations that the Taboola platforms tests for you.
We ended up pausing after just two weeks as folks were getting stuck in the signup flow and we realised we needed to iron out some things before we continued to fill the funnel. But the results even from the two weeks showed:
- Much more cost-efficient clicks for B2B lead targeting than Linkedin or Google Ads. The CVRs were strong but CPC was significantly lower.
- The landing pages far outperformed sending traffic to the homepage – in fact all of our signups during the two weeks were via the /why page.
- There was a clear winner among the ads and it was the one all of us liked least. A reminder to not be biased and test things in the wild!
The campaign didn’t run long enough to really get a sense of ROI versus other channels but the early signs were enough that I’d experiment again.