Has Outbrain lost it's native edge?
November 11, 2015
Has Outbrain lost it's native edge?
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Outbrain
We currently use Outbrain across clients that want to drive awareness of their blog / content. We primarily use it where clients want to increase traffic to their site as this is a metric clients are looking to increase year over year (YOY). We don't tend to use it on all clients as it really does depend on their main KPI for each campaign.
- 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.
- Users that started with Outbrain had a higher AOV when followed up by display inventory.
- Outbrain helps drive direct sales during sale period.
Outbrain used to have the best reporting / performance out of all the native suppliers that we've used however now I feel that it is lagging behind and lacks optimisations which means we've started looking around for a better platform.
It may be that these features are available but no one has been in to show us or explain to us what is new and what can now be done.
It may be that these features are available but no one has been in to show us or explain to us what is new and what can now be done.