The “First 24 Hours” Rule: How to Survive Taboola’s Exploration Phase

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.

Launching paid campaigns at scale on Meta Ads is a logistical nightmare. Especially when you’re dealing with multiple ad accounts, fan pages, and audience targeting variations. Doing it manually through Facebook Ads Manager is not just inefficient, it’s guaranteed to burn hours on tedious, repetitive work while increasing the risk of human error. But what if you could launch hundreds of campaigns with hundreds or thousands of ads across multiple ad accounts and fan pages in a matter of minutes? That’s exactly what I did! 👊 Instead of spending 8+ hours manually setting up campaigns, targeting, and uploading ads one by one, I used a simple, well-structured workflow that eliminated launch friction and bottlenecks. In addition to that, what makes this workflow even more efficient is the ability to add dynamic automatic optimization rules. The result? A streamlined mass launch process that not only saved time but also ensured budget-efficient adjustments without constant manual oversight. This guide will walk you through every step of the workflow, from setup to scaling, so you can replicate the process and maximize efficiency in your own campaigns. Pre-launch Preparation Define Campaign Structures and Templates The first step I went through was to define the campaign structure and settings I wanted to use. This way, I could set up campaign targeting templates and get them ready for my launches. Below are the following structures I wanted to test: Campaign Structure 1 Campaign Objective Sales Budget Allocation Campaign Level (CBO) Campaign Optimization Event Purchase Placements Exclusion Audience network, Messenger, Ads Over Reels Number of Ads per Ad Set 1 Ad per Ad Set Number of Ad Sets per Campaign Variable (depending on the quantity of the ads) The goal of this campaign structure was to put Meta’s algorithm to work and find me the best creative for each campaign. Campaign Structure 2 Campaign Objective Sales Budget Allocation Campaign Level (CBO) Campaign Optimization Event Purchase Placements Exclusion Audience network, Messenger, Ads Over Reels Number of Ads per Ad Set 3 Ads per Ad Set Number of Ad Sets per Campaign 2–3 Ad Sets per Campaign The goal of this campaign structure is to test which of the previously tested creatives is going to win over the others, as well as see if it gets more results in a shorter period of time. Now that my structures have been defined, all I had to do was create my campaign templates. To save my campaign targeting settings as templates I used TheOptimizer’s Facebook Launcher. Here’s the step-by-step process of what I did. Step 1: Logged in to my Optimizer account and went to Campaign Creator Step 2: Specified the campaign settings like ad account, running status, special categories (if any), campaign objective, bid strategy and budget. Step 3: Specified Ad Set naming structure,  performance goal, pixel, optimization event, country targeting, beneficiary (if needed), and placement exclusions (where I generally either spend a ton of money or time setting it up). Step 4: Saved the campaign settings as a template for later use. This is what actually helped speed up the process by a lot, saving me the trouble of going through the above steps for each and every campaign. I repeated the above steps a couple more times to define a template for the Finance product special category and the employment special categories resulting in three main campaign templates: CBO Purchase $100 US – Excl. AN-MSG CBO Purchase $100 US Fin – Excl. AN-MSG CBO Purchase $100 US Hous – Excl. AN-MSG Pro Tip:  If needed, you can specify the Facebook and Instagram Fan Pages in the template; however, in my case, I left that intentionally undefined since I was going to test multiple fan pages. Organizing Campaign Names and Creative Tags Since I was going to launch a lot of campaigns in bulk, having a clear campaign naming structure and organization of the creatives using tags was crucial for me to avoid potential bottlenecks. In fact, I wanted to test such a flow to make it easily replicable later on and document it in my launching SOPs. Two were the main things I wanted to be well-organized besides the campaign templates. The campaign names The creative tags Regarding the campaign names, I wanted to be able to easily tell which client/supplier I was promoting on the campaign, the buyer name, which vertical/offer I was promoting on the campaign, as well as the launch date. To make things easier with campaign names, as well as the creative tagging, I created a Google sheet where I could easily generate the names and tags based on my input. Below is a sneak peek of how the sheet looked ⤵️ 📋 Click here to get a copy of the sheet. How this sheet worked was pretty simple. Any campaign marked as “Pending” in the sheet is considered a task for the creative team to generate ad creatives for. Each campaign required 6-12 creatives, testing at least 2-3 different angles and 3-4 distinct designs for testing. With these guidelines in mind, the creative team could easily review campaign links, analyze offers, and create the necessary assets. Once the creatives were ready, all they had to do was go to. Creative Library > Media > Upload New Media. To upload the creatives, they simply had to drag and drop the creatives from the local folder, then tag them during the upload process. Pro Tip:  Unique tags for the creatives were already generated in the Google Sheet automatically, so the team simply needed to copy and paste them during the upload. During the testing phase, this process was handled manually to validate the workflow. Once confirmed, creative uploads to TheOptimizer were automated using their API. Meta Ads Automation for Stop Loss and Scaling Although this step may seem unrelated to mass launching, those familiar with the process know how crucial it is to stop underperforming ad sets and campaigns before they waste too much budget. With nearly 100 campaigns ready to be launched, I needed automation to quickly cut losing campaigns and scale winners—all while continuing to launch new ones in bulk. This ensured minimal wasted ad spend and consistent scaling of profitable campaigns. Here are some of the automatic rules I used in this launch. Stop Loss Automatic Rules Rule 1: Pause Ad Sets at $10 without conversions. Although based on a simple logic, this rule struck a good balance between creative testing and minimizing ad spend waste. Rule 2: Pause Non-Converting Meta Campaigns After a Full Daily Budget of Ad Spend I was looking for campaigns that could generate at least 1 conversion within the first day, or when they’ve spent 100% of their daily budget. The campaign’s budget was already set to 5 to 10 times the average payout or CPA goal for the campaigns. Rule 3: Pause negative ROI campaigns after three full days of running. The goal of this rule was to practically turn off any campaigns that by day three couldn’t reach an ROI higher than -30%. If you look carefully at the rule conditions, you will notice that the rule mimics the behavior of the media buyer. That of checking the campaign performance, each and every single day, and making decisions upon the progress of the campaign. If the campaign didn’t improve and pass the required threshold, then the campaign would get turned off. Automatic Scaling Rules Rule 4: Increase the daily budget by 30% twice a week if ROI is stable. Just like the stop-loss rule that kills the campaign after the third day of running if the ROI isn’t getting better than -30%, this rule does the opposite. If over the last three days, the campaign performance is stable according to the ROI threshold set in the rule, then the rules will increase the daily budget of the campaign by 30% two times a week. It is worth mentioning that when this rule changes the budget. It doesn’t do it at a random hour, instead does the change at the beginning of the day according to the other account time zone so that Meta ads starts the new day with a new budget, knowing well what the budget will be for the rest of the day. Rule 5: Duplicate Winning Campaigns 1x Week by Resetting Their Daily Budget This rule is part of my strategy to scale winning campaigns, not only vertically but horizontally too. While […]