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Outbrain is a versatile platform that serves a variety of use cases for users across different industries. For the paid media team at …
Overview
What is Outbrain?
Outbrain, headquartered in New York with offices globally, is an internationally known native advertising platform for curating and publishing content across a variety of channels and media spaces, containing editorial controls, analytics for judging impact, and related features.
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What is Outbrain?
Outbrain, headquartered in New York with offices globally, is an internationally known native advertising platform for curating and publishing content across a variety of channels and media spaces, containing editorial controls, analytics for judging impact, and related features.
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What is Taboola?
Taboola is a native advertising platform from the company of the same name in New York for publishing "recommended" content in a variety of popularly visited news sites and spaces. Taboola is partnered with many publishers (the Atlantic, Tribune, MailOnline, Business Insider, etc.).
What is Choozle?
Choozle, headquartered in Denver, provides a digital advertising software platform that leverages consumer data to power programmatic advertising campaigns across display, video, mobile and other mediums.
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Outbrain Thumbnail Widget - Demo Video
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What is Outbrain?
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What Is Outbrain?
Outbrain Technical Details
| Operating Systems | Unspecified |
|---|---|
| Mobile Application | No |
Frequently Asked Questions
Outbrain, headquartered in New York with offices globally, is an internationally known native advertising platform for curating and publishing content across a variety of channels and media spaces, containing editorial controls, analytics for judging impact, and related features.
Reviewers rate Usability highest, with a score of 7.8.
The most common users of Outbrain are from Mid-sized Companies (51-1,000 employees).
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Community Insights
TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!
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- Pros
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Outbrain is a versatile platform that serves a variety of use cases for users across different industries. For the paid media team at AdRizer, Outbrain is a valuable tool for driving website traffic at an affordable cost. The straightforward guidelines and minimal disapprovals make it a preferred choice over larger social platforms. Working with the dedicated account manager ensures a seamless process, even providing white-glove commitment by answering emails after hours.
For e-commerce stores looking to expand their ad reach, Outbrain comes highly recommended for testing and promoting products on new ad stacks. It has been successful for reviewers who have found it to be an effective campaign-specific media tactic. Additionally, Outbrain functions as a brand awareness tool for credit unions, reaching potential members and generating interest in their offerings.
Outbrain's ability to amplify content extends beyond marketing campaigns. It has been used by Berlin Magazine online newspaper to market their articles, though they have faced challenges with customer support. However, the tool is trusted and well-known in general. Nonprofits have also leveraged Outbrain to significantly increase overall traffic and capture email addresses.
Furthermore, Outbrain plays a crucial role in content distribution and audience engagement strategies. Bloggers have utilized Outbrain to increase impressions and exposure for their content. It helps promote global and local content, finding new channels to identify targeted audiences and increase brand awareness. By customizing content based on relevance, Outbrain allows users to effectively capture audiences and drive engagement.
Overall, Outbrain offers diverse use cases across industries, whether it be driving traffic, amplifying content, or increasing brand awareness. Despite some challenges with customer support or code problems reported by users, the platform's benefits are recognized by its extensive user base.
User-Friendly Interface: Several users have found Outbrain's user interface to be easy and simple to use, allowing for quick campaign creation. They appreciate the straightforward navigation within the platform, resulting in a smooth overall experience. With minimal learning curve involved, users can easily navigate through the clean and intuitive dashboard.
Cost Savings: Some users have noted that Outbrain's CPCs are comparatively lower when compared to other Social Native platforms. This has led to potential cost savings for these users, making Outbrain an affordable option for their advertising needs.
Quality Traffic Generation: Despite initial concerns about native ads being spammy, many users have been pleasantly surprised by the decent quality of traffic generated through Outbrain's platform. They appreciate that Outbrain's comprehensive distribution network allows them to reach outlets frequented by their target audience but would otherwise be difficult to target. This additional reach helps increase visibility in the marketplace and provides valuable exposure to their content.
Limited ad customization: Some users have expressed dissatisfaction with the limited customization options for ad formats in Outbrain, stating that it restricts their ability to have more control over how their ads appear.
Billing setup complexity: Several reviewers have mentioned that setting up billing for multiple accounts can be a cumbersome process, resulting in inconvenience and complexity.
Vague targeting options: A number of users have found the targeting options in Outbrain to be vague and unclear, making it difficult to accurately determine their target audience. This lack of clarity has been reported to impact the effectiveness of ad campaigns.
Attribute Ratings
Reviews
(1-17 of 17)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
March 25, 2022
Worst customer support ever
Score 1 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- among the worst customer services ever, answers after days without ever giving an answer
- the widget can conflict with the site (I use a Wordpress)
- customer service reachable only through a general email
- costumer service
- Communications
- Easy Navigation
- CBS Strategies
- I wish there was an activity log (i.e. Changes made to account over time) to help troublesome where the advertiser made a mistake OR needs to make an adjustment
- A big caveat is when running CBS (i.e. Target CPA) you cannot adjust your bids since this bidding strategy is automated. After a while you will be limited by the number of publishers you can block. There are over ten thousand publishers but you can only block 1,000.
September 22, 2020
Great for getting eyeballs, but very low ROI if you're looking for direct conversions!
- Traffic
- Increasing views/sessions
- Get more exposure to valuable content
- Targeting outside of specific websites or niches
- Value of traffic
- Outdated admin
September 21, 2020
Outbrain - Low click cost with high revenues
- Variable CPC helps keep the cost low - too huge the inventory.
- Multiple goal optimization to its best, in this platform.
- Selective bidding on the publisher helps scale the campaign.
- Sudden addition of new publisher in the campaign with high clicks hamper the campaign performance sometimes; there should be a check.
- Event based conversion implementation is a bit challenge still.
- Lack of account teams in the organization for Indian geo is another challenge.
September 15, 2020
Good price for what it delivers...
- Trustworthy content.
- New info.
- Ideas for social media posts.
- General information.
- Better filtered articles, maybe by region?
September 14, 2020
Does What You Want It To Do
- Easy to use overall, no major hiccups.
- Initial set up is fairly simple.
- Outbrain's distribution network is great and pretty comprehensive.
- The terms and conditions of the platform can vary and change rapidly, what works one time might not work a second later.
- Customer service representatives can sometimes be hard to get a hold of.
- Lead generation, verification and capture.
- Contact databases with good amount of details to customize or filter based on important parameters.
- Marketing analytics.
- Pipeline management for tracking leads which are potential targets.
- NPS scoring.
- Lead Database Integration.
November 05, 2019
Delivers Average Traffic at a Great Value
- Easy, simple to use interface that can create campaigns pretty quickly.
- Comparatively lower CPCs when compared to other Social/Native platforms.
- Surprisingly decent quality of traffic. As spammy as some native ads can seem, we've received quality leads when using this platform at scale.
- Ad formats are not very customizable, limited on how your ad appears.
- Billing setup can be a pain if you're working worth multiple accounts.
- Targeting is pretty vague, not sure who the audience really is, need to monitor traffic using the platform such as GA to ensure it's not too spammy.
January 21, 2019
Outbrain: Too brainy for a simple outreach
- 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.
- Confusing dashboard: I am used to using a content distribution platform similar to Outbrain, but I was honestly overwhelmed by the complexity of Outbrain's dashboard.
- Difficulties in adding new contents: I don't know why but I often encountered an error message while adding a batch of new contents to the dashboard. The message basically said that the content violated Outbrain's terms and policies, despite them being safe (proven when it was considered okay when I input the content links one by one).
- Blacklist and whitelist: The features are offered in Outbrain, but it is relatively difficult to set up as you really have to check the websites you want one by one. In my experience, Outbrain does not offer a group of similar websites in the whitelist recommendation. This will help a lot. For instance, a group of news media websites should be recommended to be whitelisted for a news company user.
- Distribution Network - We are able to appear on a very wide variety of websites in a more organic way than through traditional display advertising.
- Ease of Use - The Outbrain platform was incredibly simple from set-up to optimization. The dashboard is clean, easy-to-use, and very trainable to other team members.
- Unique - We found very few comparable services (other than Taboola), and getting into this space of advertising puts you in a completely different view than the typical sidebar or skyscraper ads.
- 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.
September 15, 2017
Outbrain - Content Distribution Hit or Miss
- Provides additional reach through outlets your audience may live [in], but you wouldn't be able to target otherwise.
- Easy to use and implement. Wasn't much of a learning curve at all which can be very appealing when using promotional platforms like this.
- Great customer service response. They typically are very responsive in answering your questions and also have a general FAQ page to filter through if you aren't one to hop in the phone.
- Targeting a specific audience doesn't really exist. This creates a frustration because you sorta have your hands tied as to how Outbrain selects who sees it.
- Would like some optimization feedback on the ads we put out. If there is something that can be improved upon, give me a hint, or, maybe the content I'm putting out just isn't going to attract new audiences.
- It would be nice to see some sort of integration with Outbrain and HubSpot as well.
March 28, 2017
Outbrain Review
- Large network of sites
- Good ad format
- Large network of sites allows for good amplification of content
- Reporting not as robust as would have liked
- End user quality not as high as anticipated
- Expensive pricing method
September 28, 2016
Outbrain for Content Amplification and Traffic
- Outbrain is on a CPC model, so they are great if you want people to visit your article rather than just see an ad.
- Outbrain is good at helping create article titles for advertising purposes.
- The outbrain platform was not user friendly in my opinion.
- Reporting was difficult. Many of the reports I needed, needed to be pulled by a rep.
May 06, 2016
Outbrain reaches a strong audience
- Nice reporting
- Wide range of publishers
- Communicative support staff
- More competitive click rates
- Regional targeting options
April 29, 2016
Outbrain - Significant reach, but unkown B2B value
- I can provide additional reach through online news outlets without having to execute a direct publisher paid media buy.
- It can align our brand with a credible publication that has either included our content or quoted one of our experts and extend visibility in the marketplace.
- Outbrain can [somewhat] mask a pay-to-play model as earned media reach. Outbrain is an oddity in that it's neither Earned or Paid media.
- Outbrain reach attribution is something that needs to be addressed, since our executions are packaged within publications that pick up our content...our usage of Outbrain drives traffic to the publication that has included our brand in some way. Therefore, this is not a direct extension of reach, but indirect reach. Therefore, when we report on Outbrain, it needs to be packaged in a way that assumes additional impressions, but not 1:1, since we're not driving traffic to our brand.
- More granular tracking capabilities (utm parameters for destination URLs). Follow the URL syntax appending that Oktopost leverages for social media. It's important to be able to track engagement or direct response goal tracking as associated to Outbrain reach.
- Placement scoring relative to how prominent a brand is mentioned within an article. This will help in the creation of reach attribution models and understand the quality of the Outbrain generated traffic.
November 11, 2015
Has Outbrain lost it's native edge?
- Drives relatively cheap traffic to content pages or articles on other sites that might have been written.
- Platform is simple to use and easy to navigate. Working within an agency we see multiple platforms from different suppliers and Outbrain is one of the most simple.
- Customer service has got better over the last year or so. We were originally on a managed service, it was good but when we moved to self serve it was quite poor, however now they are very fast to respond.
- Optimisation within the platform is poor for this type of technology - you can't set ads to evenly rotate so you can see which piece of content is performing best. Only real things you can change are CPCs and budget . Nothing to do with site placement, frequency etc., etc. It auto optimisies to what Outbrain thinks is the top performing and ignores the rest but this isn't what you always want.
- Reporting suite on the back of the optimisations is poor - can't manually get sitelists / impressions. Geo targeting / frequency / audience profiling can't be got.
- No ranking of ads - don't know what's good / bad about the ads to help optimise new titles / content/.
- Only send through to certain bits of content - this can be quite strict.
October 27, 2015
Value of Outbrain for Nonprofit Content Distribution
- Gets content to new audiences. It's a great tool for acquiring new visitors at the top of the funnel.
- Outbrain team is easy to work with and will share best practices and tips. That's helped improve our campaigns over time.
- The tool is easy to use. Just choose your content, add headlines and photos and let the algorithm do its job.
- There isn't really targeting available, which I've had to remind senior leadership of a bit. I don't think that needs to be changed, but they could provide talking points to help sell to senior leadership.
- The content does cast a wide net, so you might need to do some tweaking to get a relevant audience. The optimization feature has helped.