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If your e-commerce growth depends only on search and social, you’re competing for the same crowded, costly inventory as every other brand in your category. When acquisition costs rise on those channels, scaling spend usually means paying more for each additional sale.
The open web gives you another place to find customers. People read reviews, gift guides, and articles on premium publisher websites while they’re deciding what to buy, and Realize turns that browsing into a performance channel for e-commerce brands. The open web complements the channels you already run, rather than replacing them.
Once you connect your e-commerce store to Realize, the platform helps you reach high-intent shoppers through audiences, targeting capabilities, and ad formats designed to drive sales. Here’s what you need to know to turn the open web into a scalable growth channel.
1. Fast Setup With Store Integrations
Realize needs conversion data from your store to attribute sales, optimize campaigns, and measure performance against purchases and revenue. How you connect that data depends on your store’s platform, with several options for installing the tracking.
Free Taboola Pixel App for Shopify
If your store is built on Shopify, the free Taboola Pixel app installs in a few clicks and creates your e-commerce conversions automatically, so campaigns optimize toward sales.
WooCommerce and WordPress Plugins, Google Tag Manager, or Manual Pixel Setup
If your store runs on WooCommerce or WordPress, install the appropriate Taboola Pixel plugin and connect it to your Realize account. For other stores, install the pixel through Google Tag Manager, or set it up manually.
Tracking Test Tool and Pixel Helper
Before you launch, use the Tracking Test Tool and Pixel Helper to confirm that purchase events fire correctly, and that Realize receives them.
2. Reach Shoppers With Purchase Intent
Not everyone browsing the open web is ready to buy. Realize uses audience, behavioral, and contextual signals to find shoppers based on what they’re interested in, what they’re researching, and the content they’re consuming.
Purchase-Intent Signals and Interest-Based Targeting
Interest-based targeting helps you reach people whose open web browsing behavior and content interests align with your category. If you sell in direct-to-consumer (DTC) categories such as apparel, health and beauty, home and garden, furniture, or pet products, start from shopping behavior, rather than broad demographics.
Realize’s In Market For segments (currently in open beta, with availability depending on scale in each market) go further, using signals like conversion data, search behavior, and mail engagement to reach shoppers actively in-market for categories such as apparel, home and garden, and pet supplies.
Search Keyword and Mail Domain Targeting
Search Keyword Targeting reaches people based on what they’ve been searching for. Mail Domain Targeting uses the commercial emails in a consumer’s inbox as another intent signal. If people are receiving promotions from retailers in your category, you can reach them with your own offer while they’re actively shopping the category. Mail Domain bundles group related domains by vertical, such as sportswear, beauty, or home and garden, though availability varies by region (Search Keyword Targeting is available in the U.S., U.K., Hong Kong, and Taiwan, and Mail Domain Targeting in the U.S., U.K., Hong Kong, Taiwan, Canada, Australia, Romania, France, Brazil, and India).
Contextual and Topics Targeting
Contextual and Topics Targeting place your ads next to relevant content, such as gift guides, product reviews, and seasonal shopping moments like back-to-school or the holidays. The content provides the signal, so your ad appears alongside related shopping content without needing to know who the individual reader is.
3. Retarget and Recover Lost Sales
Pixel Audiences
After the pixel is live, Realize builds audiences from on-site behavior. You can re-engage people who viewed a product and shoppers who added items to their cart but never checked out, two groups that have already demonstrated clear interest in what you sell.
Dynamic Creative Optimization
Dynamic creative optimization (DCO) tailors retargeting ads to the specific items each person viewed, so a visitor who looked at a pair of boots sees those exact boots, rather than a generic brand ad. Realize DCO campaigns are supported by a dedicated team, so you don’t have to build each ad variation by hand.
Exclude Recent Purchasers
Retargeting someone immediately after they buy wastes budget; turning on exclusion for your purchase conversions keeps impressions focused on people who can still convert.
4. Find New Customers Who Look Like Your Best Ones
With first-party data flowing into Realize, the platform uses signals from your existing customers to expand prospecting beyond broad audience targeting.
Predictive Audiences
With Predictive Audiences, purchase or add-to-cart events act as a seed for finding new people likely to behave the same way. The models need a baseline of conversion history to work effectively, so they’re most useful when your store has accumulated more data.
Customer File Uploads and CRM Lookalike
In supported markets, you can also upload customer files and use your customer relationship management system (CRM) Lookalike targeting to reach new people who resemble your existing customers. CRM Lookalike is currently only available in the United States.
First-Party Segments via Customer Platform Integrations
If you use a customer platform like Klaviyo, you can sync your first-party segments directly into Realize as custom audiences, instead of manually exporting and recreating those audiences.
5. Creative That Sells Products
E-commerce creatives have to attract attention and show shoppers what you sell clearly enough to move them closer to a purchase. Realize gives you several ways to turn existing product assets into performance-driven ad formats for the open web.
Carousel Ads
Carousel Ads let you feature three to five products or offers in a single ad, each with its own destination URL, so you can showcase a product range, compare options, or promote several offers at once.
Motion Ads
Motion Ads use a short, silent, looping video or GIF to bring product imagery to life, and tools like Motion Ads Studio can turn existing static images into motion so your creatives stand out, without requiring a full video production workflow.
Social Importer
The Social Importer converts your best-performing Facebook and Instagram ads into 300×250 and 300×600 display ads optimized for premium web placements, without redesigning or reformatting content.
6. Optimize Toward Revenue
With conversion and revenue data in place, Realize optimizes bidding around purchases and order value while giving you controls to safeguard your budget when performance changes.
Maximize Conversions Toward Purchases
Maximize Conversions automatically adjusts bidding to drive as many purchases as possible within your budget. You can set an optional target cost per acquisition (CPA) when you need a firmer limit on what you’re willing to pay for each conversion.
Pass Revenue and Order Values
Passing revenue and order values back to Realize through the pixel or server-to-server (S2S) tracking lets you measure ROAS, not just conversion volume.
SpendGuard and Custom Rules
During peak shopping periods, traffic and spend can change quickly, so automated guardrails help keep inefficient delivery from consuming budget at scale. SpendGuard automatically identifies underperforming sites based on CPA and conversion rate (CVR), then caps or blocks them to protect your budget. SpendGuard runs by default, but you can review its actions or turn it off any time.
Custom Rules lets you define conditions for sites, ads, or campaigns and automate the response when those conditions are met.
7. Scale Through Peak Shopping Seasons
Peak shopping periods put more pressure on campaign timing and budget pacing, so Realize gives you tools to manage delivery and scale spend more deliberately.
Campaign Scheduling, Pace Ahead, and Budget Controls
Campaign Scheduling lets you align delivery with specific promotions or shopping windows. If a campaign is underpacing or you want to put more of the remaining budget to work sooner, Pace Ahead (available for monthly and lifetime budgets) increases the daily budget. It does this by drawing forward part of the spend allocated to future days without exceeding the campaign’s total budget. Budget controls keep overall spend within the limits you set as demand and competition increase.
Performance Simulator
Performance Simulator (currently in beta) uses your campaign’s recent performance data to forecast how a budget change would affect conversion volume and CPA, before you commit more spend.
Key Takeaways
Realize gives your e-commerce brand a way to turn open web browsing, shopping behavior, and first-party data into a scalable performance channel beyond your existing media mix. Connecting store data early gives Realize the signals it needs for targeting, retargeting, audience expansion, bidding, and measurement. Start with intent, then expand: reach shoppers showing stronger buying signals, recover lost sales through retargeting, and use conversion data to find more people likely to buy.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do Realize and Shopify work together?
Shopify runs your store, including the catalog, checkout, and payments, while Realize drives new shoppers to it from premium publishers on the open web. The free Taboola Pixel app for Shopify installs in a few clicks and creates your e-commerce conversions automatically, so campaigns optimize toward sales.
How do Realize and BigCommerce work together?
BigCommerce supports omnichannel and B2B selling, while Realize adds an open-web acquisition channel for BigCommerce stores, which is useful if acquisition costs on social channels are rising. Install the Realize pixel manually or through Google Tag Manager to track purchases, then use Predictive Audiences, contextual targeting, and Topics Targeting to reach likely buyers across premium publisher sites. If you also want product-specific retargeting, connecting your product catalog feed enables dynamic creative optimization, which is supported by a dedicated Realize team.
How do Realize and WooCommerce work together?
WooCommerce gives WordPress sites flexible e-commerce functionality, and the Taboola Pixel for WooCommerce plugin connects conversion activity to Realize. Carousel Ads and Motion Ads showcase your products across the open web, while Custom Rules and SpendGuard help keep spend efficient as the store grows.
