Taboola and Outbrain: AI Prompts to Supercharge Creative and Advertorial for Native Ads

Native ads are below-the-funnel ads that are meant to look organic. They are not traditional display ads. For the first time in half a decade, CPMs on native ads are dropping and the quality of traffic is the best it’s ever been. A continued focus on creativity and innovation is the key to achieving scale and profitability on native ads platform.

The future of native advertising will be hyper-targeted content. Creativity is what is needed to drive value through content-based funnels:

1. Reach relevant people
2. Serve them a problem
3. Sell them a solution

Building a Perfect Native User Journey

1. The Ad
2. The Content
3. The Action

How Does AI Help?

AI can accelerate almost every step of building the Native Ads campaign. AI is not ready to completely replace human beings, but it can accelerate our work and help increase productivity.

The most challenging part of Native Ads is the creativity. AI can spark creativity and help find new and refreshing ways to sell on Taboola.

Below is a sample AI technology stack and methodology powering Native Ads:

• ChatGPT (Content & Ideas)
• Canva (Image Editor & Stock Photos)
• FreePik (Creatives)
• Dall-E-2 (Creatives)
• Webflow (CMS)
• Heyflow (Form Builder)
• Microsoft Clarity (Heatmap)
• Voluum (Tracker)

Use the tools to perform the following:

1. Defining Your Audience
2. Create Your Headline and Hooks
3. Write Your Content and Advertorial
4. Find Your Thumbnail and Creatives
5. Mixing and Matching for Upload
6. Optimize Fast

Defining Your Audience

Connect the service or product to the consumer. Understand who you are trying to sell to. Answer the question: Why do people buy product or service X? If you’re unsure, ask ChatGPT!

Create Your Headline and Hooks

Headlines and hooks are helpful to segment the user. Spend 5-10 writing headlines and then ask ChatGPT to write headlines and adjust them.

ChatGPT Prompt: “Write 10 headlines up to 60-character each around the reasons why people are looking for dental implants with the intent of using them for advertising on Taboola”

Optimize and readjust the prompt accordingly. Here are example prompts to help create and optimize the winning headlines and hooks.

ChatGPT Prompt: “Do it again, but don’t mention dental implants”

ChatGPT Prompt: “I need headlines that are going to generate a higher click-through rate in ads”

ChatGPT Prompt: “Add numbers and statistics”

ChatGPT Prompt: “Rewrite these headlines for woman over 50”

ChatGPT Prompt: “Rewrite these headlines for people living in Dallas, USA”

ChatGPT Prompt: “Rewrite these headlines for retirees in the USA”

ChatGPT Prompt: “Rewrite these headlines for people experience tooth pain”

Select 10 headlines you think are creative, interesting, and can tie to the content you’re going to write. Avoid limiting your testing to what you think since you are not your audience. Headlines that are questionable could be the winning headline so have an unbiased selection process.

Write Your Content and Advertorial

The most time consuming part is writing the content and advertorial. AI-written content pages typically loses to human written content based on split tests but AI-written and then human adjusted and edited content stands a real concrete chance against the best copywriters out there. By combining AI with human creativity, it’s possible to achieve a better result. Especially in foreign language, AI can help quickly create and translate content. For the vast majority of services or product, 300-500 words is the sweet spot for the character limit. Keep landing pages concise and short.

ChatGPT Prompt: “Write a 400 to 500 word advertorial. Start with the introduction to what the problems dental implants solve, and then present the solution to these problems as dental implants. End with a sense of urgency and a call to action for the reader to buy dental implants”

Take the generated advertorial, and edit it. The idea is that you know your product or service, and problem better than AI. Editing helps create better content. Import the finished advertorial into a landing page template.

Avoid spending your first dollar on split testing design elements on a landing page. There are plenty of templates to use and focus your time on optimizing the creative content on the advertorial.

Find Your Thumbnails and Creatives

The goal is to find 10 interesting images. There are many tools to find and generate creatives. Taboola has introduced AI generated thumbnails and images. Stock image platforms, Dall-E, Freepik, Canva Pro, etc. AI is great for interesting faces, people and scenery. It’s not so great with understanding relationships between objects, concepts and people. Other limitations to using AI for creatives and images include complex scenarios and faces during moments of action.

However, Native ads do not need to be perfect as sometimes the weirder the image or creative the higher the click-through-rate (CTR). Mistakes in the creative can be positive and help catch the attention of the end visitor.

Choosing The Right Assets to Upload

Start at the bottom of the funnel with your offer, understand your funnel and then collect your creative assets (headline and images) at the very end in reverse order.

Sample Test: 10 headlines + 10 ads = 100 ad variations

Sample Test: 2-4 landing pages

Prioritize as many tested variables as possible in the first test. Test genders, ages, problems, CTR-Driving adjectives, etc.

Optimize The Funnel Quickly

Optimize the funnel as quickly as possible. The goal is to optimize to reach profitability and scale. Achieve this by looking at the data and averages:

• Hard conversion events (CPA)
• Soft conversion events
• Landing page CTR
• Ad Metrics (vCPM / CTR)

The average should be the floor. Any campaigns that don’t meet the floor need to be paused immediately! It’s almost impossible to be profitable in one shot, but having positive data results will help towards the path of profitability.

Use heatmap tools to understand audience and user behavior. Find the events where the user is dropping off. Is it the headline, call-to-action, cookie consent form, etc.? Tools will help you understand and create better pages to convert users more efficiently.

Lastly, organize and split campaigns by device type. Optimize campaigns, funnels, and advertorials based on devices.

Interested in launching and scaling search arbitrage campaigns? Native ad platforms such as Taboola coupled with AI are a great source for high quality traffic to help fuel long-term and sustainable search arb campaigns.