What is Sponsored Content? How Can You Optimize Content Recommendations for Improved Click-Through Rates?

One of the most successful means of promoting our site and expanding our reach has been by use of sponsored content. We started using one vendor but when they accidentally ran our promotions an extra $10k – and then invoiced us for it and demanded we pay them – we called it quits. We moved to Taboola and had even better results with opportunities to segment our audience by country (with relative click-through rate costs).

There are over 5M pieces of content currently promoted through our content discovery platform, and thousands of brands running content campaigns. It’s fair to say that we’ve pretty much seen it all, and on the way learned a thing or two about what makes people click and engage across our platform. Taboola

What is Sponsored Content

Many outlets confuse native advertising and sponsored content promotions. Sponsored content is quite different, typically a bar of content directly underneath a published article that has relevant articles by topic. The sponsored content company, like Taboola, scans the published content to produce the best match in results to achieve a higher click-through rate. I believe the greatest strength of sponsored content is its ability to get your content discovered.

How to Increase Click-Through Rate on Sponsored Content

Taboola has put together this infographic to help you optimize your sponsored content – from the approach to writing your title tag to the types of thumbnails or featured images you publish. Utilizing action verbiage that’s directed to your audience and rich, visible images that look good in a small format are critical.