Outbrain test drive: native advertising in action

As a reader, I tend to resent almost every instance of native advertising.(See Native Advertising’s Apologists Miss The Point).

For publishers I fear it’s a Faustian pact: sell your hard-earned reader trust for short-term revenue (or possibly, I admit, for survival).

But for marketers, I say ‘Go for it.’  There are audiences out there hungry for your content. Your job is to find them.

So we thought we’d run a quick test of one of the leading native advertising platforms, Outbrain. This is their elevator pitch:
“Grow your audience by distributing your content on other sites, where people are looking for something new to discover. The audience coming from Outbrain is already in content consumption mode, therefore more engaged and more likely to stay longer.”
Outbrain is essentially like the Google ad network but for content ads. You’ve seen their ads (or those of similar services like Taboola) at the bottom of posts and articles all over the web. they look like this:

The ads are all for content, not products and they’re rarely if ever relevant to the article they appear under.  The ads above appeared under a blog post about content marketing on Outbrain’s own site.  Maybe the connection between ‘used to be hot celebrities’, ‘psycho pregnant’ women and content marketing is too subtle for my primitive human algorithm (which triggered a ‘Say what?’ alert).

Pando Daily removed a similar service, from Gravity, on the grounds of embarrassing irrelevance as Paul Carr explained in this post.

As a publisher, like Pando, seeing dramatically off-brand content should be mortifying. As a brand, I also wonder whether the ads my stuff would appear next to would be for things like sure-fire Abs pills or free Prada handbags. The context we tend to think about is whether the site and article are right for our ads. But you do have to think about your ad neighbours, too.

Anyhoo, we thought we’d give it a go.

Whoah — this is easy.

First thing we learned: Outbrain has made it incredibly easy to start and manage a campaign. Taking a page from the Google Adwords book (okay, stealing the whole book), they’ve created a super-simple self-service campaign creator and manager:
You log in.
Enter the URL (or RSS feed) for the content you want to promote.
Try some alternate headlines and images to test for the best performer (not easy to do but possible).
Tell it the Cost Per Click you want to pay – I chose £0.55 because that was the default setting and I am a sheep and set a daily limit (£25 for this test.)
Choose your target geographies (US and UK for this test).
Then tell it how long the campaign should run (I said a week) (I know: cheapskate).
And stand back, waiting for the campaign to be ‘approved’ (not sure what would be vetoed if ‘psycho-pregnant murderers’ are fair game).
We decided to test Outbrain by promoting a brand new Slideshare: Irresistible Content for Immovable Prospects.   So the image statyed the same – the cover of the piece – and we just tested ten headlines.

Tracking Codes

‘Performance’ for Outbrain is clicks (where they make their money). But for me, it’s all about conversions: things like how many people actually read the whole piece, spend time on our site, go and get other pieces and, ultimately, sign up for our newsletter or — God forbid – become a client.

Fortunately, Outbrain lets self-service customers add a tracking code to the campaign URL so you can identify Outbrain-generated traffic in your analytics and see what those clicks are really worth. If you spend enough every month, they’ll do some conversion tracking for you.
For this pilot, I’ve ignored tracking codes and conversions just to focus on the topline: how the tool works and how well it drives views. But real conversions, of course, are the only way to measure real ROI for any campaign.
(For what it’s worth, my hypothesis would be that Outbrain-generated traffic would under-perform other sources on engagement metrics, for reasons that will become apparent).

Whoah — this is maybe too easy.

Unlike Google Ad Words or LinkedIn ads or Twitter promoted tweets, you don’t really get to preview your ads. You submit them for approval and wait. I’m not crazy about this but at least you can try different versions (they don’t seem to encourage it as it’s far from intuitive to do).

A day after setting up the campaign, we got an email saying “Congratulations! Your campaign has been approved.”

And ‘approved’ means – “It’s live.”

Which means, “Don’t trouble your tiny little brain about what your ads look like or even WHERE THEY APPEAR — we’ll take care of all that. We know best.”

And that’s the problem I have with Outbrain.

The Black Box

Outbrain is ‘black box’ content distribution. Stick in a piece of content and stand back.

Not being able to preview my ads is annoying but the opacity of the sites they’ll be appearing on is far more worrying.
Outbrain tells you very, very little about their publisher network. They tell you nothing about the size and reach of the network, what publishers they’re working with or the demographics they’re able to reach.
I believe this is because the network is fairly limited and the more specialised your content is, the less likely it is that you’ll find enough relevant publishers in their network.

In other words, our ads won’t appear on sites that I’d consider relevant.

Does relevance matter?

Call me old-fashioned but I kind of buy in to the idea that an ad about, say, content marketing, should appear in places where content marketers congregate because it’s where content marketing is discussed.

Here’s what Outbrain says about that.

The Hunt for Our Ad

If Outbrain wasn’t going to show us what our ad looked like or where it appeared, maybe I could use the list of my “Top Publishers” and go looking for it myself.

No luck. I tried every site listed in my Top Publishers list and I refreshed pages and scrolled infinitely (when available) looking for our lonely ad. One thing became clear: Outbrain has an enormous inventory of content it’s promoting at any one time. The chance of stumbling on our tiny ad with its miniscule spend seems to be vanishingly small.

And most of the Outbrain inventory seems to be from the Buzzfeed school of click-sluts. Which I’d hate to try to compete with.

Outbrain’s support site says, “We use a complex set of algorithms to try to find the most interesting and relevant recommendations for each individual on every page.” but it sure feels like a finger in the air.

BTW: they do let you exclude up to 5 publishers from your campaign — but you have to email them to do so.

I get that data wins over marketing instinct but, sorry, I can put together a list of 50 sites where my content ads would perform FAR better than Men’s Health. But if these sites aren’t on the Outbrain network, they can’t reach them.

Conclusion

On the main metrics, Outbrain delivered. They said I’d pay £0.55 per click and that’s what I paid.

They couldn’t spend my entire budget in the week allotted (because I’d never out-perform the side-boob ads in their inventory) but they did what they said they’d do and it was EASY.

If you want to buy traffic, this way is worth considering. But if you want to build an audience in a fairly specific niche, I’m not yet convinced.

Content marketing is a specialised discipline. I haven’t done the test to see what Outbrain-generated traffic does once it hits our site but I will be utterly flabbergasted if a guy killing time on Funchoke is as good a prospect as someone reading a post on, say, The Content Marketing Institute or Marketing Profs or Econsultancy or Convince & Convert.

I expect the Outbrain publisher network to grow enough to let them target campaigns properly. But until then, I’d only recommend it if your offer is broad enough that it doesn’t feel silly to be on Spry, Inc.com and The Telegraph all at the same time.

For Velocity, 55p is a lot to pay for a click, so I don’t think we’ll do more Outbraining for ourselves (though we may test the conversion thing). But for the right clients, I would consider it. It’s a well-designed product and you only pay for the clicks not the impressions, so the downside is not so far down.

I’m not crazy about stooping to buy traffic alongside the purveyors of psycho-pregnant murder stories. But content marketing is no place for the squeamish.