Outbrain Reviews

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.

I never had to contact support aside from a billing issue I believe. The issue was related to billing profiles for multiple clients and/or granting admin access to other users to manage. Support was responsive and explained the issue thoroughly, but it was more of a shortcoming of the interface, so there wasn't really much they could do. Everything is pretty self-explanatory, so as with most of these platforms nowadays if you have a question, you'll be directed into their knowledgebase to figure it out yourself, so par for the course there.

Outbrain is well suited when you have the time to deal with all of its features and complexities. It allows you to customize the content and where your content will be promoted, as well as having a more sophisticated targeting feature. However, for the user like me, who is used to a simpler dashboard, Outbrain can be a tad too overwhelming.

This seems like it might work better with more evergreen content that doesn't get too granular. Not very good if you are trying to target a specific audience, or even test it for that matter.

The type of client (B2B / B2C) and their unique media goals are highly dependent factors on if or how to use Outbrain. There is a massive amount of reach available through Outbrain, but understanding how to use and measure it efficiently is the challenge. If a brand is leveraging a PR driven, earned media push into the marketplace, Outbrain should definitely be included if publications are picking up the brand content. Leveraging Outbrain to extend this reach allows for the inclusion of the brand (name) in headlines that are then posted on various other news outlets (the goal is to increase the click through rates). The challenge will be to report on the number of Outbrain impressions and clicks associated to the possible additional exposure of the brand. Keep in mind that if an Outbrain driven post recorded 1000 clicks and 25000 impressions, that doesn't mean your brand received that equivalent reach. This is where you need to possibly integrate an attribution model that assumes that your brand's reach (as packaged content within an Outbrain leveraged news story) may be 50% of the total Outbrain reach.

We haven't found the value to be worth the effort it takes to work through the long list of editorial guidelines necessary to pass through the review stage. While valuable exposure can be gained from Outbrain, it is a lengthy process to prep your website or blog for the Outbrain requisites. However, if you already have a fully prepared website, and are in need of impressions apart from traditional advertising, Outbrain could be beneficial.

Outbrain is appropriate when you want someone to click to an article and read the blog. It is useful to increase traffic to your blog and website. It is less useful for a direct response client, where you are driving a particular conversion.

It is not suited for test / trial pieces of content, we find that it works better for how-tos or top 10s. You need to make sure you find out what the content is before you promote it and if you want to do any testing as Outbrain isn't really the best for testing things.

It's appropriate if your product or cause could potentially appeal to a wide audience, or if that's your goal. It's not ideal for very targeted or specific goals. Use the conversion optimization feature to help reach the right audience, but know that feature is more expensive. Overall it is on the pricey side compared with Facebook, for example, but provides access to a huge audience.