Taboola is wasting my budget on "Click-Farm" sites. How to filter?

C

Clickradar

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I'm testing a new campaign on Taboola with a $100 daily budget. In the first 2 hours, I got 500 clicks from 2 specific publisher IDs, but my site stay time is 0:00. It’s clearly bot traffic or a click farm.

I manually blacklisted those IDs, but then 5 new ones appeared and did the same thing. I feel like I'm playing 'Whac-A-Mole' with my money.

Does anyone have a 'Global Blacklist' of trash sites for Taboola? Or is there a trick in the settings to only show ads on premium news sites? This is burning my ROI fast.
 
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Use Taboola’s “Premium Inventory” option and set CPC caps, there’s no global blacklist so you gotta manually block junk sites as they appear.
 
why dont you run on google ads ? taffic actually converts on google ads, i dont think there's another ad network with this size of inventory.
 
Ca
Clickradar said:
I'm testing a new campaign on Taboola with a $100 daily budget. In the first 2 hours, I got 500 clicks from 2 specific publisher IDs, but my site stay time is 0:00. It’s clearly bot traffic or a click farm.

I manually blacklisted those IDs, but then 5 new ones appeared and did the same thing. I feel like I'm playing 'Whac-A-Mole' with my money.

Does anyone have a 'Global Blacklist' of trash sites for Taboola? Or is there a trick in the settings to only show ads on premium news sites? This is burning my ROI fast.
Click to expand...
Can you please let me know your trusted partner who is providing such agency taboola? cause I am looking for them but found AdScaleLab LLC and they too providing the same, please let me know if you know anyone providing Taboola & Outbrain or Bing Agency Ads.
 
jason haney said:
why dont you run on google ads ? taffic actually converts on google ads, i dont think there's another ad network with this size of inventory.
Click to expand...
Because the whole thread is fake and bs. Fake promotion of this.
Greenberg said:
Ca

Can you please let me know your trusted partner who is providing such agency taboola? cause I am looking for them but found AdScaleLab LLC and they too providing the same, please let me know if you know anyone providing Taboola & Outbrain or Bing Agency Ads.
Click to expand...
I am calling bs.
Suddenly newbie ad gurus came out of no where.

If you get fake clicks the first thing you do is stop the ads and contact taboola customer support.
 
Last edited:
jason haney said:
why dont you run on google ads ? taffic actually converts on google ads, i dont think there's another ad network with this size of inventory.
Click to expand...
Google Ads is great but CPC is too high for my niche. Trying to make Native work for better margins.
 
Greenberg said:
Ca

Can you please let me know your trusted partner who is providing such agency taboola? cause I am looking for them but found AdScaleLab LLC and they too providing the same, please let me know if you know anyone providing Taboola & Outbrain or Bing Agency Ads.
Click to expand...
I’m using a direct self-serve account, not an agency. I haven't tried AdScaleLab or any others yet, so I can't recommend any. I prefer managing my own budget for now.
 
There's no perfect global list, but you can manually compile a blacklist by exporting low-quality placements daily and blocking entire domains, not just IDs. In settings, use "Placement Optimization" to automatically downrank low-performing sites over time. For premium-only, select "News & Entertainment" category and set a high minimum viewability score, but this severely limits scale.
 
Clickradar said:
I'm testing a new campaign on Taboola with a $100 daily budget. In the first 2 hours, I got 500 clicks from 2 specific publisher IDs, but my site stay time is 0:00. It’s clearly bot traffic or a click farm.

I manually blacklisted those IDs, but then 5 new ones appeared and did the same thing. I feel like I'm playing 'Whac-A-Mole' with my money.

Does anyone have a 'Global Blacklist' of trash sites for Taboola? Or is there a trick in the settings to only show ads on premium news sites? This is burning my ROI fast.
Click to expand...

Pretty normal with Taboola.

There’s no real global blacklist: low-quality publishers rotate constantly, so manual blocking becomes whac-a-mole.

What works better is filtering based on post-click behavior (0:00 time on site, no JS events, repeat patterns per publisher ID) and killing those sources fast. I track this with Opticks, but the key is judging traffic quality after the click, not just CPC.

Also helps to slow down optimization in the first hours so Taboola doesn’t scale junk traffic too aggressively.

Hope it helps.
 
blacklist those IDs and then switch your campaign to "vCPM" or only target "Premium" placements in the settings to avoid the junk sites. you can also use a tool like ClickPatrol to auto-block the bots before they drain your budget.
 
Happens alot man, best way is run whitelist only with proven placements, Taboola traffic quality can be hit or miss on open targeting.
 
you need to use whitelist only bro, blacklisting takes forever and bot sites keep poping up.
 
switch to "Smart Bid" or "Max Conversions" instead of manual CPC, it helps the algorithm avoid sites with zero engagement. also check the "Premium Reach" setting to keep your ads on better publishers.
 
On Taboola, enable Premium inventory only and use a global publisher blacklist to block low-quality sites.
 
Switch your campaign targeting from 'Taboola Network' to 'Premium Publishers' only, and set a strict CTR block rule in your tracking software to auto-ban high-click/zero-time IDs
 
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