As marketers continue to look for alternatives to the diminishing returns of search and social, the open web is becoming an ever-more appealing option. To help you get the most out of this channel, I talked with Xevio co-founder and CEO, Nadim Kuttab, an advertising veteran who’s worked closely with Taboola to bring affiliate, brand, and arbitrage spend to new heights globally. Having grown a multi-million-dollar native ads agency, built out the premier native advertising community on Native Hub, and spent hundreds of millions of dollars on ads globally — as well as working on a sizable chunk of the largest Taboola ad accounts out there — it’s safe to say that Kuttab has advice worth listening to.
Why is the open web, and particularly native advertising, becoming a dominant channel for e-commerce direct response?
It’s always been a good channel, it’s just that most people have never fully understood how to use it! It’s becoming more dominant now because there are a lot more direct response e-comm brands, and the traditional channels where people start, whether it’s search or social, are becoming harder — they’re becoming less predictable, and if you’re building a business, one of the things you hate most in life is unpredictability, right? You want to know that you can spend X and get Y in return, and native is exceptionally good at that.
We’ve had dozens of cases over the last two years where e-commerce brands that worked with us really saw consistent and sustained revenue and growth from Taboola, but also from native ads and performance display advertising in general. So, I just think that people are becoming more aware of it. As I said, it’s always been good, it’s just becoming more popular now.
What are the core differences in strategy when approaching e-commerce direct response on the open web, versus social platforms?
On social, you’re competing for attention with a lot of other people, so you have to be very creative — you have to have catchy videos, or very eccentric or colorful things that catch the user’s attention while they’re scrolling. Social media feeds are also tailored towards the user behavior of that person — channels like Meta and TikTok are very good at finding you the right people. The downside of this is that it’s often the same people for a lot of different brands, and therefore the prices can be quite high, especially during peak seasons.
With the open web, it’s very different: You don’t target individuals, you target placements. If you’re an individual on Meta who has a user profile, Meta knows what you like and what you don’t like, what you click on and what you don’t click on. On Taboola, we’re targeting placements, so you might not read the same websites every day, and therefore we might not consistently reach you, but we will definitely reach you, because you’re reading on the open web.
That’s why I’d say that generalistic approaches always work better, because it’s about reaching as many people as possible, finding the right people in that mass of users, then bringing them into your content-rich environment, where you can present them with ideas and sell them your product. It’s a very different form of advertising, because one is very platform-assisted in targeting an individual, and the other is essentially mass media. That’s also why products that have a broader appeal tend to work well on Taboola.
Can you share a compelling success story of an e-commerce brand achieving significant sales growth with native ads?
Yes! We had probably the craziest e-commerce case I’ve ever seen as a marketer, where a brand went from low seven figures in revenue to nine figures in one year. I could barely believe it myself! Taboola was responsible for close to 100 million of that, on a first-click basis, which goes to show the actual power of native if used right.
This brand didn’t just do native correctly, though — they did everything else correctly, too. They built their strategy on native, but then made sure that the people who were coming in were caught on retargeting campaigns, on search campaigns, on shopping campaigns. They did a phenomenal job with email retargeting and remarketing: They have a fashion product that you don’t expect people to continuously buy or re-buy, but we saw a ton of repeat sales, which obviously drove up their LTV.
How do you identify and target high-intent e-commerce buyers within the vast network of the open web?
We always start with the open web ad space and then transition to Meta, etc. Most brands will do it the other way around: They’ll have Google and Meta campaigns, but what they should look at is, what approaches are working on a broad network? Then build content around that.
What role do engaging content experiences play in driving immediate purchases on native platforms?
Everything! Taboola is a content discovery platform, in essence: It recommends content, whether it’s organic content from publishers or paid content from advertisers. So, say you don’t create content: You’re just sending people from a Taboola ad to the homepage of a shop with 600 products. People will not buy, because you have no story — you’re essentially just throwing things out there and hoping somebody picks it up. That’s not how the world works, especially nowadays, where people have so many choices and options that allow them to make more informed decisions.
If you do it right, though, good content on Taboola can mimic the quality of a clickout from branded Google search, which is wild — you’re taking a cold user and warming them up to a point where they want the product. So, yeah, engaging content is everything. We do not have campaigns succeeding on Taboola right now without engaging content. And we spend six figures a day, easily!
How does the ability of Realize (Taboola’s performance platform) to offer diverse inventory and placements benefit e-commerce advertisers?
So, I was the first guy to criticize this update and be like, “Oh, no, they should stick to what they know!” But, I was wrong, and I’ll admit it. I checked yesterday and our top ad on the case I just described is no longer native, it’s display, and with a 30% lower CPA than our top native ad. Display offers real potential for growth. The ads aren’t aggressive, they’re just very direct and they work exceptionally well when done right. Really, these display placements can be incredibly powerful by just having direct messaging that appeals to people. Again, don’t sell a product, sell a problem.
Realize supports a wide range of ad formats, including native, display, vertical, and carousel ads, empowering advertisers to achieve their objectives with creative flexibility.
And in terms of being able to place those display ads in multiple spots and in different styles — static, motion, etc. — how much does that affect your success?
The fact that Realize gives us the ability to play around with so many different ad formats is a huge asset for the good marketers and media buyers out there. The truth is that the big agencies and brands are going to be slower at iterating and experimenting with these new formats, so if you get ahead of that curve, you can benefit from much less competitive inventory that performs just as well.
What’s the most critical factor for an e-commerce brand to succeed with direct response campaigns on the open web?
Let’s start with the basics: You need to have a product that people can buy immediately. If you’re going to sell a $16,000 scooter, that’s probably not a direct response play on Taboola. I hate to burst the bubble of the scooter brand owners, but it’s just not going to work! We found that 70-120 bucks is the sweet spot. You can go higher, but you need to expect substantially higher CPAs. It needs to be direct to consumers, not selling some networking equipment to businesses — the audiences are too broad on Taboola for that.
If you’re running at scale on other channels, you also need to have an attribution tool in between — whether it’s Triple Whale or Klar or something else, it doesn’t matter, you just need to have a system in place to assess first and last click attribution properly, because every platform will take as much credit as they can. If you’re only optimizing on each individual platform independently, you’re not going to get anywhere.
After that, it’s retargeting on other channels. If you’re only looking at the last click, you’re missing out on probably three or four times as many sales on a first-click basis just by not properly retargeting, doing email marketing, Google search marketing, or Meta. As with everything in the e-commerce space, it’s always a mix: If you’re only focusing on one part of something, you’re missing out. To see success on e-comm, you need to do everything right.
