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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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- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
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Alternatives Pricing
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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Outbrain Amplify - Explainer Video
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What is Outbrain?
Outbrain Video
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 Small Businesses (1-50 employees).
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(37)
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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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
(1-8 of 8)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
AdRizer is one of the leading native agencies in South Florida. We utilize Outbrain on a daily basis with our team of 10+ buyers. Averaging well into millions of spend months with consistent results.
The account manager assigned to us answers at all hours of the day, just yesterday Alexa Cupo answered a lengthy email after 8 pm. This kind of white-glove commitment to their clients is the reason we continue to use it.
It does take some time (at first) to build data, working with your account manager will make this process run seamlessly. Personally, Outbrain is preferred over its competitors.
If you are an e-commerce store wanting to push your products onto new ad stacks I would highly suggest giving Outbrain a test.
The account manager assigned to us answers at all hours of the day, just yesterday Alexa Cupo answered a lengthy email after 8 pm. This kind of white-glove commitment to their clients is the reason we continue to use it.
It does take some time (at first) to build data, working with your account manager will make this process run seamlessly. Personally, Outbrain is preferred over its competitors.
If you are an e-commerce store wanting to push your products onto new ad stacks I would highly suggest giving Outbrain a test.
- 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 21, 2020
Outbrain - Low click cost with high revenues
Outbrain is a great find for our marketing campaigns when it comes to acquisition and brand awareness. The software is particularly used by the promotions & acquisition team to find new users and a very genuine cost per reach. The platforms bills on every clicks it achieves by promoting the campaign which ensures best use of marketing monies.
- 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 14, 2020
Does What You Want It To Do
Our current use of Outbrain is to reach possible new members for our credit union. We target and advertise to those via Outbrain that are the most likely to engage with us later on. Outbrain is used more as a brand awareness tool to get more of a passing interest in what our credit union offers.
- 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.
Outbrain Amplify is used by my ogranization to find new channels for identifying targeted audience with our offerings to promote our content using Outbrain's premium publisher network. Our foremost purpose is to increase our brand awareness amongst our target audience and geographies where we are trying to make our sales more predominant. It has helped us so far in capturing audiences by making our content rich and custom based on their relevance.
- 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
We utilize Outbrain as primarily an awareness channel for a pretty diverse mix of clients/industries. It's currently only being used by the paid media team. It is a great platform to get a lot of users to your site relatively affordably. While it has some limitations in terms of content, most of the guidelines are straightforward and are not subject to the random disapproval that is becoming more common in the larger social platforms.
- 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
My company, a news media, is looking for a platform to market our articles. We were previously using another content distribution platform but we're looking for a cheaper alternative due to weakening currency (IDR). Outbrain came as an alternative as it offered cheaper CPC than our previous choice. There were also other alternatives, but Outbrain is significantly more well-known and hence trusted in our view.
- 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.
We use Outbrain to distribute content pieces on our blog onto advertising channels for increased impressions and exposure. We write content which is useful to everyone, and we distribute the content on the Outbrain network to increase readership on our blog and awareness for our brand. Overall, Outbrain provides us with an audience for the content we write relating to our product offerings.
- 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.
March 28, 2017
Outbrain Review
Outbrain was used to enhance the reach of a client's content campaign through sponsored links in articles relevant to the content.
- 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