Google Ads vs. Outbrain vs. Similarweb

Google Ads is a useful advertising tool to build brand exposure and generate lead volumes for your chosen product. Whilst it can be costly at times due to competitor bidding strategies and requires constant monitoring to ensure campaigns perform as expected, it typically provides the desired quality and quantity of leads for custom budgets.

Incentivized

If your client or organization is running a high volume awareness campaign, Outbrain would be a platform to diversify your mix with. Pretty low maintenance and easy to set up, you can get ads running in a few minutes. If your primary goal is conversions, there are probably better channels you can use where the targeting is a little more transparent and would likely see a higher avg conversion rate.

Incentivized

Similarweb is our go-to tool for SEO research. We can identify high-value keywords, track our rankings, and monitor changes in our website's traffic. This data is invaluable for optimizing our content and ensuring we rank high on search engine results pages.

Incentivized

• Automated targeting via Smart Shopping campaign. It's one of the best campaign types in Google Ads. In the beginning, you may see lower revenue and ROAS, but once you give some meaningful time to your campaign, it is most likely to perform well.
• Smart bidding strategies: Google Ads has developed some really great bidding strategies such as maximizing conversion and maximizing conversion with ROAS settings. Based on one's requirement and their goal with revenue and target ROAS, they can choose the appropriate bidding strategy.
• Reporting: A business owner and advertising must know about their audiences, how their campaigns have been performing, what's working and what's not, and for that reason, powerful, effective reporting is needed, and Google Ads provides rich details reporting that covers almost every aspect of a business.

Incentivized

• Website network: Outbrain provides high-quality websites in its network so that you can get a quality audience.
• Affordable pricing: The CPC offered by Outbrain is relatively cheaper than other alternatives.
• Content dashboard: The dashboard allows you to edit the content before publishing it on Outbrain's platform.

Incentivized

• Competitive Analysis: Similarweb has provided us with a comprehensive toolkit for analyzing web traffic and audience behavior for various sports teams, leagues, and players. We can compare and contrast their online presence, helping us gain a competitive edge by understanding their digital strategies.
• Sponsorship Decisions: Making informed sponsorship decisions is vital in sports. Similarweb assists us in evaluating potential sponsorships by providing insights into the online presence and reach of potential partners.
• Audience Demographics: One of the standout features of Similarweb is its ability to provide detailed audience demographics. We can pinpoint the age groups, locations, and interests of online visitors, which is crucial for tailoring content, promotions, and sponsorship deals effectively.

Incentivized

• If you don't know what you're doing, it will be a costly mistake. You need to target ads, and it is difficult the first time to do that.
• There isn't a feature to run an add for a couple set date spans, just hours you want to run them or a single date span.

Incentivized

• Customer Service - Speaking to a human is nearly impossible, there is no "chat" function, and no phone number immediately available. Ultimately, I've had to email a generic CS contact and wait several days before heading back.
• High Number of Guidelines - The number of guidelines one must meet before using Outbrain is much higher than any other ad platform I've used. Most of them are highly specific and not necessarily items that a website would have out-of-the-box.

Incentivized

• Sometimes I find it takes time to find exactly where a certain analysis I had looked at previously is when I go to replicated. Website could be streamlined that way.
• You can only compare 5 companies at a time on the website but often I'd like to compare more. You can always download the data to compare two different searches, but that adds time.

Incentivized

I think Google Ads is good for getting your company out there and becoming more visible to potential customers in general. However, for specific product launches, social media advertising might be a better fit. Also, our user base is younger so social media is a better channel for our target audience.

Incentivized

I use it every single day and its essential to succeeding in my role

Incentivized

This is more of a subjective rating, because I think it can be increased with how much our ad spend is. The more of an ad spend, the more visibility we can get, and therefore all features can climb. With an overall larger presence the usability is that where we can get messages out quick, and that's the main thing we try to do with our campaigns.

Incentivized

The use case is very obvious, brand awareness and low cost conversions because of its reach in billions. The platform is easy to use, well sorted and defined with good click optimized algorithms and brands can use it without hesitation. If monitored well and optimized accordingly, this can prove to be one of the best advertising channels.

Incentivized

Similarweb is a very easy to use tool and gives us data on the go. It takes only a few clicks to get the relevant data. However, I have deducted 2 points as it only allows us to add 5 websites at a time on the platform, and data availability is only for the last 37 months.

Incentivized

We have not yet had an account rep who hasn't tried to bully me or other employees to raise our budgets. At the same time, several years ago, one attempted to help refine our ads and ended up changing the ads to be something we were not affiliated with

Incentivized

We had an account manager assigned to us, but they really didn't offer too much help outside of the financial side of things. We used the self-serve platform with mild suggestions every few weeks from our reps amounting to "spend a bit more here."

Incentivized

Support is just helpful and effective when you need them; we have only needed to contact them once about a misunderstanding while setting up our Market Analysis. Since we don't really contact them too often, it's hard to offer anything but a positive rating from the single positive experience we had with tech support.

Incentivized

Daily use with advanced account structures. Familiarity with reporting/api and complex setups.

We liked it, things can always be better

Incentivized

Our agency invests heavily in Google Ads (particularly paid search advertising) on behalf of our clients relative to competitors like Microsoft and Yahoo because Google is the top search engine in the world. Google collects the most search data which enables the company to improve its AI to drive better performance for agencies and brands. As such, our paid search and app install campaigns always start with Google. If a client has a large budget, we will allocate media dollars to other search engines, but in some cases, the entire search budget goes to Google because we see the best returns.

Incentivized

Here at AdRizer my personal ad sources primarily revolve around Google Ads & Outbrain. Taboola is extremely similar to Outbrain minus the fact that strategies are dictated on the account level unlike by campaign with Outbrain

Incentivized

Whilst data.ai has strong app competitor intelligence data, Similarweb do a better job of showing the upstream and downstair behaviour across desktop and mobile web. Additionally, Similarweb's channel marketing mix goes deeper and allows us to understand a wider set of channels and be able to get a holistic understanding of our overall marketing strategy performance

Incentivized

• Google Ads is often one of our highest ROI channels, especially when you factor in branded ads.
• Depending on the stage your business is in, search ads can be really powerful from an ROI perspective, providing an investment with a very high spend cap.
• If you do not manage the campaigns well though, you can quickly spend a lot of money on nothing. So make sure someone is keeping an eye on your account.

Incentivized

• None. My perspective is that further testing is needed as well as additional tracking capabilities applied to be able to assess value. However, it's a CPC model and relatively inexpensive in regards to additional reach, especially if it's packaged in with an Earned media push into the marketplace.

Incentivized

• Boosting Organic Search Traffic: By leveraging the data and insights provided by Similarweb PRO, we have helped several businesses significantly improve their traffic from organic search. The platform's keyword research, competitor analysis, and market trend identification capabilities have enabled us to create tailored and effective SEO strategies for our clients, resulting in increased visibility and traffic growth.
• Securing New Projects: Similarweb PRO's unique insights have given us a competitive edge in the consulting space, allowing us to secure projects by offering valuable information that other firms could not provide. Our ability to analyze competitors' strategies, track market trends, and assess marketing channel effectiveness using Similarweb PRO's data has made us stand out among other consulting firms, ultimately leading to new business opportunities and project wins.

Incentivized