Outbrain vs. Taboola vs. Yahoo Ads

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

If you want to have your company advertised on news websites across the United States then Taboola is perfect. If you're looking for clicks and impressions but not so much interested in traffic that is highly engaged and converting often then I'd suggest Taboola as an option to run traffic, too. This is the perfect platform for grey-hat offers and similar ideas. I wouldn't suggest it for running ads on your website due to some strict conditions and the fact that it might not necessarily play nice with traffic coming from Facebook.

Incentivized

Good for instances where search campaigns are driving poor overall traffic. Campaigns for awareness work well, and you have pretty good control of how your ads look without having to do too much work. We've used this successfully for law, financial services, and political campaigns effectively. With Twitter banning political ads, and Facebook becoming increasingly strict on their approval guidelines, this may turn into the best alternative. Would not necessarily recommend for ecommerce campaigns, or lead based campaign where keeping cost per conversion down is a primary objective.

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

• A good value on clicks -- they have visitors for all CPCs!
• Worldwide reach and relatability -- so many providers use Taboola. It's very easy to reach your audience wherever.
• High quality -- their policies ensure that only enjoyable, modest content is provided.

Incentivized

• Offers extensive solutions to reach a high volume of users and create new reach outside of major networks like Google and Bing.
• Provides unique ways to differentiate advertisers in top positions on search results pages.
• Creates unique tactics to utilize on display networks (carousel and video takeovers).

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

• I would like to see an easier way to exclude irrelevant sites that our ads received impressions or clicks on.
• Being able to bid on specific sites only.

Incentivized

• No traffic -- despite a high ROI, the lack of overall spend led to us eventually remove support for the channel from our services.
• Nothing to differentiate it from other paid platforms -- Gemini didn't particularly offer anything new or novel that made it worth using over Bing and Google.

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

It was pretty straightforward getting an account set up and having an account rep assigned. Compared to some other platforms Taboola is actually rather intuitive when it comes to navigating the user interface. Pixel implementation was easy and we didn't have any discrepancies tracking conversions. Also the ability to target LALs was very useful and semi-straightforward to upload.

Incentivized

One of my main pain points with yahoo gemini is that the product is very difficult to use and the UI seems like they took a skeleton of a similar product and made it bare bones functional for the purpose of generating ad spend. It is a huge barrier for new customers and I feel one of the main reasons they have new customers at all is all the free trial dollars they offer.

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

We have a point of contact in Taboola and he has been really great in supporting our campaign. He helped us set up the initial campaign, answered our questions related to the campaign and even agreed when I asked for a lower CPC. Also, while he tried to encourage us to spend more, he never pushed us to the point that it gets annoying.

Incentivized

They were always super helpful during training and demoing and would answer any questions we had. We didn't have a direct account manager, which would have been nice, but I just don't think their size accommodates for that type of set up. They are very knowledgeable and help guide you through a set up for each particular client.

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

Outbrain doesn't charge a fee for automatic credit card billing. Often Outbrain CPC for the same content is cheaper but not always. The Outbrain UX is not as good as Taboola but recent changes had made them better than they used to be. In Outbrain you can not change images or titles once they are submitted. You also can not clone campaigns which you can do with Taboola

Incentivized

Yahoo Gemini! does stack up well against its competitors in the smaller spending realms. We've never been able to justify the ROI when we try to scale it up to even 10% - 15% of our spend. No, we've found that it's much better as a tangential win than a mainstream channel.

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

• Taboola campaigns have had positive effects on top of funnel activities and engagement metrics though the traffic is not always as qualified as one would like. You will need to carefully tailor your campaign to squeeze out the most relevant traffic.

• It has created a more comprehensive understanding of the audience to whom a client is marketing.
• It allows clients to target and reach audience members on all major search platforms.
• It provides data and reporting to understand and analyze campaign success and optimize campaigns towards client goals.

Incentivized