Meta vs. Native: Why Your Facebook Strategy Will Fail on Taboola

We’ve all been there. You launch a campaign, it survives the learning phase, and suddenly—bingo!—you’re seeing profitable days. The CPA is low, the ROAS is high, and your dopamine is to the roof. Naturally, you think, “If I’m making money at $100/day, I’ll make double at $200/day.” So, you double the budget. The next day? The campaign crashes. CPA skyrockets. Performance tanks. If this sounds familiar, you aren’t alone. Hundreds of profitable campaigns have been ruined from unconscious budget increases. The problem isn’t your ad or your landing page, it’s the bidding strategy you’re using, and specifically, a misunderstanding of Taboola’s “Maximum Conversions” bidding strategy. The Old Way vs. The New Way To understand why this happens, we have to look at how Taboola has evolved. Back in the day (and still today, if you choose it), we had Enhanced CPC (aka Smart Bids). This was the rugged off-road vehicle of bidding strategies. Once an Enhanced CPC campaign exited the learning phase, you could be really aggressive. We’re talking about scaling budgets by 30%, 50%, or even 100% overnight without really hurting your CPA. But in August 2024, Taboola introduced a brand new bidding strategy: Maximum Conversions. The “Max Conversions” Trap Max Conversions is great on paper. It removes the need to manually bid on sites, making it perfect for media buyers transitioning from social ads (Meta/TikTok) who are used to the algorithm doing the heavy lifting. But there is a catch: It is incredibly sensitive to budget changes. Unlike Enhanced CPC, the Max Conversions algorithm cannot handle budget shocks. If you change the budget by more than 30% in a single go, you break the learnings. It doesn’t matter how seasoned your pixel is; a drastic budget increase forces the algorithm to scramble, leading to a spike in acquisition costs. The New Rules of Thumb for Scaling So, how do you scale without killing your golden goose? It depends entirely on your bidding strategy. Here is the playbook: 1. If you are using Enhanced CPC: You can afford to be aggressive. Wait for the campaign to exit the learning phase. Scale: You can increase budgets by 30% to 100% every other day (or every day if you dare) as long as it remains profitable. 2. If you are using Maximum Conversions: You must be gentle. Wait for the campaign to exit the learning phase. Scale: Increase budgets slowly—aim for the 15% to 25% range (absolute max 30%). Frequency: Do this only 2 or 3 times a week. Do not touch it daily. Automating the Discipline The hardest part of this isn’t understanding the rule; it’s actually following it and consistency. When you are managing tens or hundreds of campaigns, remembering the budget of which campaign you scaled yesterday, and which earlier today doesn’t really work. Plus calculating the exact 15%-20% budget increase for each is logistically slow. Not to mention potential mistakes. This is where automation comes in. Use TheOptimizer to handle these budget changes for you. By setting rules that automatically scale budgets by the correct percentage based on the strategy, you remove the temptation to “yolo” a budget increase and accidentally ruin your best performing campaign. Bottom line: If you are using Max Conversions, patience pays. Scale slow, scale steady, and respect the algorithm’s sensitivity.

If you are managing three or four campaigns on Taboola, scaling is easy. You log in, check the stats, bump the budget by $50, and go about your day. But if you are managing hundreds of campaigns across dozens of accounts? That is a different story. One of the biggest issues we see in 2026 is media buyers missing opportunities—or worse, ruining them—because of manual errors. When you have 200 campaigns, it’s easy to forget that you already increased a budget at 9:00 AM. If you log in again at 2:00 PM and bump it again, you haven’t just increased the budget; you’ve potentially doubled it within a few hours. This “accidental aggression” confuses the algorithm and can send your CPA skyrocketing. To fix this, you need a system. Specifically, you need a system that treats your Maximum Conversions campaigns differently from your Enhanced CPC campaigns. Here is the blueprint for automating your scaling strategy without breaking your profitable campaigns. The Two Scaling Philosophies Before setting up any rules, you need to recognize that Taboola has two distinct bidding personalities: Enhanced CPC (Smart Bids): You control the bids. This strategy is robust and can handle aggressive budget jumps (e.g., 40-50%). Maximum Conversions (Max Conv): Taboola controls everything. This strategy is sensitive. If you bump the budget by more than 30%, the algorithm assumes you want volume at any cost, and your CPA will likely spike. You cannot treat these the same. Here is how to handle each one using automation (like the optimizer). Strategy 1: The “Max Conversions” Approach (The Gentle Touch) Since Max Conversions is sensitive, your goal is steady, predictable growth. We recommend a budget increase of 20% to 25%, executed 3 times a week (e.g., Monday, Wednesday, Friday). The Setup: Create an automated rule that runs every hour but only executes at 1:00 AM (account time) on your selected days. The “Safety Checks” (Conditions): Before giving a campaign more money, the rule must pass these checks: Is it actually spending? The campaign spend over the last 7 days should be at least 3.5x (350%) of its daily budget. This ensures you aren’t raising the limit on a campaign that isn’t even hitting its current cap. Is it out of “Learning”? Only scale campaigns that have exited the learning phase. Is it consistently profitable? Don’t just look at yesterday. Check the ROI (or CPA) for the last 3-6 days and yesterday separately. For example, ROI > 25% for both periods. This proves stability. The Action: Increase budget by 20-25%. Set a Hard Cap: Tell the rule not to exceed a certain amount (e.g., $2,500). Once a campaign hits this ceiling, you can move it to a “High Scale” rule with manual oversight. Strategy 2: The “Enhanced CPC” Approach (The Aggressive Push) Because you are controlling the bids manually, the algorithm is less likely to freak out when the budget jumps. You can be bolder here. The Setup: You can run this rule more frequently (e.g., every other day) or stick to the M/W/F schedule. The “Safety Checks”: Use the same logic as above (Spend, Learning Phase, Profitability). The difference is in the action. The Action: Increase budget by 40%. Set a Hard Cap: Similar to above, ensure you have a ceiling so a campaign doesn’t accidentally scale to $10k/day while you’re asleep. The “Autopilot” Hack: Naming Conventions How do you make sure the right rule applies to the right campaign without manually selecting them every time? Use your campaign names. Label your Max Conversion campaigns with a tag like | Max Conv |. Label your Smart Bid campaigns with | Smart Bid | or | Enhanced CPC |. In your automation tool, simply add a condition: If Campaign Name contains “Max Conv”, apply Rule A. If Campaign Name contains “Smart Bid”, apply Rule B. Why This Works By automating this process, you achieve three things: Consistency: You never miss a scaling opportunity because you were busy or out of the office. Discipline: You never “over-scale” out of greed or impatience. The rule sticks to the math (20% or 40%). Safety: You prevent human error (like double-bumping budgets) that can turn a profitable campaign into a loser overnight. Stop doing mental math on hundreds of campaigns every morning. Set the rules, trust the schedule, and let the system scale for you.

We’ve all been there. You finally launch a new Taboola campaign, the excitement is high, and you step away for a while. You come back a couple of hours later to check the stats, and your heart sinks. Your budget has been spent on low-quality websites you’ve never heard of. No conversions. No engagement. Just spend. Your first instinct might be to freak out and pause everything. Don’t! Seeing your spend flow toward lower-quality sites in the first few hours is not only common, it’s actually a normal part of the process. Here is why it happens and, more importantly, how you should handle it without losing your cool (or your entire budget). Why Is My Budget Going There? When you launch a fresh account, Taboola doesn’t have a “publisher history” for you yet. It doesn’t know who your best customers are or which websites they read. So, the algorithm goes into exploration mode. It casts a wide net, testing a huge range of publishers—including some low-intent or lower-quality ones—just to see what sticks. It’s trying to gather data on where your ads convert and how audiences engage with your funnel. Think of a new door-to-door sales man knocking on every possible door pitching his product without any insight on the neighborhood he’s approaching.  The “Day One” Strategy: Be a Ruthless Gardener Just because this phase is “normal” doesn’t mean you should sit back and watch your money burn. The key to success is how you respond during this initial volatility. Here is your game plan for the first 24 hours: Monitor Publisher Distribution Closely: Don’t wait days hoping the algorithm will magically fix itself. It won’t happen fast enough to save your budget. Cut the Losers Immediately: If you see specific sites spending decent money with zero engagement or conversions, cut them or bid them down right away. Force the Shift: By aggressively pruning these bad sites, you force the algorithm to focus its learning on higher-quality supply. The Trap: Don’t Overreact There is a fine line between being proactive and being impatient. While you want to cut the obvious waste, you also need to give publishers enough volume to actually prove themselves. If a site has spent $0.50 and hasn’t converted yet, that’s not a reason to block it. Make your decisions based on data, not gut feelings or panic. Manual vs. Automated Let’s be real: sitting in front of your dashboard refreshing the page every 10 minutes to block bad sites is exhausting. It’s effective, but it’s a grind. This early campaign “cleanup” is exactly the kind of task that is better handled by automation. Tools like the optimizer can automatically block sites or adjust bids based on rules you set, ensuring you catch the waste instantly without losing sleep over it. If your new campaigns look like a disaster in the first few hours, take a breath. It’s exploring. Your job isn’t to panic—it’s to guide that exploration away from the junk and toward the gold.