Opinions expressed in this article are those of the sponsor. MarTech neither confirms nor disputes any of the conclusions presented below.

Taboola Trends launches to offer free ‘A/B insights’ into video, image, text creatives

The tool uses the company's global traffic to show which creatives drive higher CTRs.

Chat with MarTechBot

Content discovery platform Taboola, which two weeks ago announced a merger with its primary competitor Outbrain, recently released a trends tool that offers insights about the performance of ad and content creative from its publisher network.  

The combined company has roughly 20,000 publisher customers and 10,000 advertisers in 50 countries. It also claims to reach 52% of all desktop users globally.

Slice and dice by country, platform and industry. That global traffic data informs Taboola Trends. It’s a free tool to gain A/B-style perspectives on image creative, video content performance, keywords and titles.

Marketers can look at image creative by industry, device category, language and country. You can then see how variables such as text, color, subject, model gender and image type impact click-through rates. In the example below, the black and white image somewhat surprisingly outperforms the color image with an 83% better CTR.

Screen Shot 2019 10 15 At 5.05.20 PM
Source: Taboola Trends

Similarly, with video, marketers can see the video types that are more likely to be completed, by content category, country, device platform and duration.

There’s also trend data tied to keywords and phrases. In addition, marketers can test alternative headlines or image titles and see relative CTR performance estimates. Finally, the company also offers summaries of vertical-specific insights in industry benchmark reports (registration required). Though interesting, not all of this information is equally useful.

Screen Shot 2019 10 15 At 5.25.05 PM
Source: Taboola Trends

Why we should care. Taboola Trends joins Google Trends, BuzzSumo, Answer the Public and other free tools that offer research and insights for marketers seeking ideas, inspiration and context as they plan campaigns. But other than the title analyzer, Taboola Trends is not a true A/B testing tool for your individual content or ad creative. It does provide, however, a kind of directional predictor of CTR performance that can be helpful in thinking about content and creative.


About the author

Greg Sterling
Contributor
Greg Sterling is a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land, a member of the programming team for SMX events and the VP, Market Insights at Uberall.

Get the must-read newsletter for marketers.