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Delivers Average Traffic at a Great Value
November 05, 2019

Delivers Average Traffic at a Great Value

Vincent Misiewicz | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Outbrain

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.
  • In terms of overhead/labor, it is minimal, so looking at a perspective of how much time it takes to set up and manage, it's pretty efficient.
  • For clients focusing on awareness, the large volume of impressions and clicks they can get with relatively little investment is strong.
  • If the budget is fairly limited, I wouldn't expect anywhere near the conversion rate you'd see with a social, search, or even display campaign.
When we're recommending a Native campaign, Outbrain is our platform of choice. Taboola is pretty comparable, but the setup with Outbrain is a little easier, difficult to comment on the quality of traffic they drive, but know that Outbrain is acceptable. Yahoo Gemini does a few different things, so not a true Native-only platform, but you do have more control of ad formats and how they appear, which is nice.
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.

Do you think Outbrain delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Outbrain's feature set?

Yes

Did Outbrain live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Outbrain go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Outbrain again?

Yes

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.

Outbrain Feature Ratings