Taboola Announces SmartBid Dimensions

Taboola has announced a significant update to SmartBid, an A.I.-powered technology that helps advertisers maximize their campaign performance even more autonomously.

Introduced in 2018, SmartBid uses readership pattern data from global campaigns that reach more than 500 million daily active users and deep learning algorithms to adjust advertisers’ bids, to drive actions an advertiser wants to accomplish. In Q3 2021, 85 percent of total advertising spend on Taboola tapped SmartBid.

For the past two years, SmartBid took advantage of Taboola’s scale and size, including its curiosity graph - the connection between reader interests across content - to make decisions on behalf of the advertiser when it came to auction price.

As was industry standard, SmartBid analyzed a site’s performance and used that as the main signal to adjust the price an advertiser should pay. For example, if a site drove fewer conversions for an advertiser, SmartBid would adjust the price lower and vice versa. That still meant that advertisers had to be somewhat leaned in, to take into consideration more granular circumstances such as geography, time of day, day of week, platform (mobile, app), operating system, creative, and dozens more.

Introducing SmartBid Dimensions

As of today, Taboola is taking a meaningful step forward with SmartBid Dimensions, a new way to take all of these granular circumstances and fully automate the process for advertisers. The technology uses A.I. to go beyond publisher performance to change the price of each bid, and instead look at dozens of granular dimensions advertisers care about.

With SmartBid Dimensions, advertisers can for the first time couple contextual and demographic data with more user dimensions on readers--data points which uniquely connect content, consumers and interests, and are sourced from Taboola’s 500 million daily active users and 30 billion annual clicks. These dimensions provide advertisers unique readership signals, powered by Taboola, that are inaccessible elsewhere.

“It is so important to help advertisers succeed, because advertiser success is directly correlated to publishers success and it keeps the open web thriving,” said Adam Singolda, CEO and founder, Taboola. “SmartBid is one of the most sophisticated A.I. technologies in the world, now providing advertisers an autonomous autopilot-like experience, where they can keep their hand on the wheel, but let the car drive on its own.”

“What is unique to Taboola from a data perspective is that we sit on a ‘curiosity graph,’ which understands what people do when they finish reading an article. This data shows a much more authentic version of consumers versus what they tell social networks about themselves. That helps SmartBid make accurate predictions, and as of now will help our advertisers to go beyond human capabilities to reach better results, while being even more hands off. I’m so proud of our algorithm teams for working hard to make our advertisers, publishers and open web successful,” continued Singolda.