Taboola Tracking
- Jonathan Tew
- Hunter Schaeffer
Introduction
Taboola is a self-branded internet "discovery platform", that tries to curate just the right things online to users based on a person's interests. The company achieves targeted content along with tailored advertising and marketing by making recommendations of what users may also like.
Merchant’s that are advertising on Taboola can use UltraCart’s integrated tracking to collect the click identifiers and report back conversions to the Taboola platform using a robust server-to-server postback.
Taboola Configuration
Taboola has documented the process of adding click identifiers automatically to you landing page URLS in the following tutorial. Make note of the parameter name that you use for your click id. We recommend using “tabclid”. For more regarding “tabclid” and image pixel configuration, see Taboola documentation: https://help.taboola.com/hc/en-us/articles/1500002917882-Taboola-Image-Pixel
StoreFront Configuration
Within your StoreFront navigate to Privacy & Tracking → Other → Taboola. From there you will need to configure the click id parameter name and event name as shown in the screenshot below.
UltraCart Analytics Integration
If you are using websites in front of StoreFronts (such as an externally hosted Wordpress site), make sure that you have properly deployed UltraCart Analytics to your external site so that the landing page traffic is observed by UltraCart. If you have questions about proper deployment of UltraCart Analytics to in cross domain scenarios, please contact UltraCart Support
Monitoring Postbacks to Taboola
UltraCart records all of the Taboola postback events into the Integration Logs system. Within the integration logs you can monitor the data flow back to Taboola and use the logs to troubleshoot any issues. If errors occur, they will be reviewable in the logs, visible in the dashboard widget, and reflect in the daily integration log health report sent out by email.
FAQ
Q: It seems there is no taboola id and I am curious how it will track only with click id parameter name and event name?
A: Whereas Google, Bing, Facebook, etc. all have pre-defined click ID parameters, Taboola does not. With Taboola, you tell us what the Taboola click id parameter is that you configured inside of Taboola and UltraCart will look for that parameter and store it off on the order. Then, once the payment is processed, we'll automatically do a server-to-server (S2S) postback to Taboola with that click id to the given event name that you configured. Please note that all of the S2S communication is logged within the integration logs system.
Q: What about advanced ad tracking? The person I'm using to run these ads has been doing it for quite some time, with success, and the ability to identify which ads are working are important. He said he likes to use 5 subIDs - to record ad, referring site, device etc. so I usually use 5 subid’s. I did read that there's room for only 1 subID, but it can have up to 5 parameters within it? Would this work in this situation or no... I can't tell.
A: If Taboola won't actually tell you which of your ads are working and which are not, then passing additional parameters in the UTM fields is probably the best bet. All of that UTM data is available in BigQuery on the order and your marketing person can write some custom SQL reports to extract whatever data they want.
There are numerous queries related to UTM in the documentation.