Taboola Push playbook

STRATEGY AND EXPECTATIONS

Our initial guidance is to, at the launch of Taboola Push, align your browser notification strategy with your existing messaging strategy. If something is worth an email alert or a social media share, it’s likely of interest to your browser notification subscribers. Do not worry about redundant messaging between messaging platforms. First, your users will not subscribe to as many channels as do journalists. Second, let your audience decide which channels have value.

According to our data, publishers should expect click-through rate (CTR) per notification to be in the range of 0.75% and 2.25%, depending on platform, topic and time/day.

What follows is general guidance to start, but this should be adjusted once you know more about your audience.

FREQUENCY

Our guidance is to send out a browser notification at a minimum of 3-5 times a week and up to 8-10 times a day, depending on the news cycle. Generally, we’ve seen CTR decline as frequency increases. However, you should not treat daily frequency as a hard cap. If big news breaks at 7 p.m. after you’ve sent 8 alerts, don’t hesitate to send another browser notification. Just don’t force notifications. Less is more as you’re beginning, so the data suggests to start at around five a day.

TIME OF DAY

Our time of day recommendation, based on an engagement study of two dozen publishers, is that CTR is good between 8 a.m. and 9 p.m., with peak times for engagement between 9 a.m. and 2 p.m. Obviously, breaking news supersedes general time guidance, but it’s helpful to understand engagement patterns.

DAY OF WEEK

Our day of week recommendation, based on that same study of engagement, highlights that we see better average CTR on weekdays than on weekends. But in many cases, it’s only slightly. Monday is starkly better than Sunday, but Tuesday and Saturday are almost a statistical tie. Obviously, breaking news supersedes general day of week guidance, as above.

TEXT LENGTH

With Taboola Push, you have both a Title and a Description field. But on most displays, both are extremely limited. Our recommendation is to use 3-6 words in the Title field and a single, brief sentence in the Message field, with critical words front-loaded and non-critical attribution last to account for truncation. Our latest data suggest the highest CTR is between 30 and 50 characters.

Example:

On some displays, your audience will see about 25 characters in the title field and 28 in the message field — more if letters are narrow, like “i” and “t”, fewer if they’re wide, like “m” and “w.” Given this, we strongly endorse a complementary approach to your Title and Message. Do not use the same nouns and verbs in both fields. Think of it like a headline and subhed. One complements — but doesn’t echo — the other. In short: Be extremely compact, start with important details to mitigate truncation, and take a complementary approach to your Title and Description.

Also, be sure to indicate the experience the user will encounter when they click on the message. Is it a video? Audio? Live stream? Data? Consider including words like “watch”, “live,”, “listen,” and “explore”.

Example:

TOPIC

Be sure to conduct categorial analysis and determine which types of convent resonates with the audience. Do your readers like sports more than news? Do they prefer travel or entertainment? While you should follow your own content and messaging strategy to meet your overall goals, be mindful what content is getting the highest engagement. If your Lifestyle content is the least engaged with, perhaps you need to adjust your approach to those articles or reduce how often it is sent.

Also, remember that not all messages need to be breaking news. There’s need-to-know content (road closed, manhunt on) but there’s also nice-to-know content which can resonate with your users. But sure to experiment with those nice-to-know features as well. One way is to create set times of engagement. As a publisher, experiment with building loyalty and habit by sending out messages as at fixed time, like an “Evening Read” or a “Morning Briefing”.

Example:

Whatever the case, studies have shown a steady diet of just breaking news can adversely affect engagement over time.