Basis DSP vs. Taboola

Basis DSP is well suited to every type of campaign imaginable. My firm specializes in outreach and education campaigns and we use Basis DSP in order to turn people out to events and to take specific actions. Basis has changed how we do business for the better. The hyperlocal campaigns, native campaigns, and audio campaigns have all added excellent additional capabilities to our tool box and have allowed us to complete very compelling campaigns for our clients.

Incentivized

I think Taboola is great for either lead gen or for shopping product sites. I would definitely have a full-time person running the campaigns. If not managed properly, things can get out of hand with costs going up and conversion rates dropping.

Incentivized

• Customer Service and Support is fantastic. Always willing to educate our team and help us get the most value out of the platform.
• The ad fraud features are great. Through DV360 we need to use a third-party which comes with additional costs.
• Easy to use platform.

Incentivized

• A good value on clicks -- they have visitors for all CPCs!
• Worldwide reach and relatability -- so many providers use Taboola. It's very easy to reach your audience wherever.
• High quality -- their policies ensure that only enjoyable, modest content is provided.

Incentivized

• Managed service is a little pricey and tends to have slightly lower performance
• interface is very 90's, could use a real facelift purely from an aesthetic perspective
• Reports are continually being updated but could use some refinement in output for client-facing reports

Incentivized

• I have noticed that customer support has decreased in the past year as Taboola has grown. It sometimes takes four days or more for a campaign to be approved. It used to be immediate and always within 24 hours.
• Credit card billing with high fees is now mandatory. If a company is going to make credit card billing mandatory don't charge fees. Our expense has increased by around 2.5% which I need to always keep in mind when comparing the CPC of campaigns on competing platforms.
• Our customer support rep used to give us a lot of help with optimization. We stopped getting support from her over eight months ago and we recently got an email that we now have to contact support@taboola.com even though our spend had almost doubled! However, we just were informed that we will now have a new rep, hopefully we will get more support now. When I say support I mean a rep that contacts us with optimization ideas.

Incentivized

It's pretty basic, nothing is hidden and nothing ever moves so you can count on finding what you are looking for each day

Incentivized

It was pretty straightforward getting an account set up and having an account rep assigned. Compared to some other platforms Taboola is actually rather intuitive when it comes to navigating the user interface. Pixel implementation was easy and we didn't have any discrepancies tracking conversions. Also the ability to target LALs was very useful and semi-straightforward to upload.

Incentivized

We have a dedicated account rep. She makes it seem like we are her only client, she is very responsive, helps each time we have a question and understands our campaign goals. Anytime we need support, our rep is available either email or call and if she is not going to be available, she will let us know ahead of time to provide back up and inform them of our current campaigns so they can better assist us.

Incentivized

Support on Taboola has been great. We have always been in constant communication with their team and they have answered all of our questions and helped us when we had any issues or concerns.

Incentivized

There are a ton of tactics and strategy to implement in the DSP platform. There isn't really a selection of the different types of campaigns or tactics to choose from, you just have to learn as you go. Once you figure out the strategy and goal of the campaign it is very easy to implement the tactic and to achieve its goals.

Incentivized

Basis [DSP] has much better fraud control than SmartyAds DSP. Even though they do not have the amount of supply inventory as Smarty, they have much more controls for invalid traffic and bots which is very important to minimize discrepancies and issues with clients. Compared to other DSPs though, it lags on performance solutions.

Incentivized

Taboola ranks pretty low for us, right next to Criteo and Revcontent, but above Traffic Junky. It's still nowhere as good as the social media platforms or Google. We selected Taboola because we had previously run ads years ago and wanted to see if we could make it profitable again. It offers more targeting options than Revcontent and Traffic Junky. I didn't care for the billing by credit card though. I would much prefer a net 15 or net 30 plan.

Incentivized

• Basis DSP allows us to reach users in many different places while controlling costs - access to major exchanges at a competitive bid rate allows us to provide a lot of added-value to clients without dramatically increasing the cost they incur.
• The team is friendly, helpful, and responsive, so we don't have a lot of situations where we're locked in campaign downtime due to a customer service issue with negative downstream impacts to the bottom line.
• Periodic reporting outages have resulted in campaigns that overpace and incur needless costs (however, this is certainly an exception, not the rule).

Incentivized

• Taboola guarantees stable user flow across the campaign period. I use balanced spending setting on my campaign so that the budget is well spread throughout the month, but usually, the traffic is higher nearing the end of the campaign.
• New users and more awareness. Taboola allows us to reach potential readers without much hassle.
• Users from Taboola are a high-quality audience who spend a lot of time on your website and read several pages. Unlikely to be bots.

Incentivized