What Is Outbrain?

Do you know how it is when you finish reading an article online only to find more articles that might interest you? This is Outbrain, a content accessibility system that appears at the end (or in the middle) of articles. What is its advantage? That people reach the end of the article and look for something else to read, they are open to advertisements, their engagement level is high and they could get good results, unlike when using banners.

During the past year, Outbrain has done a significant advance in its publishing system, from a very basic content promotion system to an advanced system which includes plenty of advanced tools. The biggest changes are that Outbrain allows to promote landing pages and not only contents, and that they have a video promotion product. In this post I am going to tell you about some advanced Outbrain tools, without which your campaigns will not be as professional as they should.

 

Targeting According to Areas of Interest

The first tool you should know is slicing according to areas of interest. Outbrain has quite a few areas of interest that may be relevant to your audience:

How does Outbrain determine your areas of interest? Apparently they have a website that can map your interests. Here, for example, is a map of mine:

Link Tag

Outbrain allows to add a Google Analytics tag to your ads, to track them using Google Analytics or other platforms, including adding dynamic parameters from the campaign, automatically:

For more information about link tags on Outbrain, including dynamic parameters

Adding Follow Up by Remarketing Pixels From Other Advertising Systems

Outbrain allows to add pixles of a third-party advertising system such as Facebook. If you are promoting an article on an external site (for example, an article on Y-Net) you can add remarketing pixels from Facebook or other platforms and color the users:

For more information about adding pixels for follow up

For more information about adding the Facebook remarketing pixel

Remarketing For Articles and Remarketing For a Website

Outbrain allows to remarket the articles promoted by them, even if you do not have a pixel in the website you refer to. How do you do that? Choose the campaign you promoted in Outbrain, and only the audience who clicked using the campaign will see your ads from this campaign.

But you can also remarked your website, create audiences based on addresses in your website (for instance, all those who reached the Thank You page) or all those who visited your website:

For more information about creating remarketing audiences on Outbrain

Conversion Measurement

How do you measure conversions? Outbrain allows us to create conversions based on a website address (for instance, all those who reached the Thank You page, or according to events, that we plant in the thank you pages). This allows us to measure conversions, not only for leads, but also for sales, including the option to dynamically embed the transactions:

Outbrain has a tool called Outbrain Pixel Tracker – this is a Chrome add-on that allows you to check that the remarketing pixel and the conversion pixel you installed are correct. You can download it here:

For more information about conversions on Outbrain

Lookalike Audiences

Like Facebook and Google, Outbrain also has a tool to create lookalike audiences, for existing audiences in your account. The system finds people who look like your original audience. In Outbrain, the original audience can be only people who clicked your campaign or a remarketing list you created. This could still bring audiences of a higher quality than an open campaign.

For more information about lookalike audiences on Outbrain

Creating Scheduled Reports

Outbrain allows us to create scheduled reports, so that every day (or any other time period), we get a relevant report with the data from our campaigns in our e-mail box.

For more information about scheduling reports on Outbrain

Video Promotion (Focus)

I saved the best for last, Outbrain has launched a new video product, Focus, which is very different that the video product on other platforms. While in Facebook or Youtube, the ads “interrupt” the user, in Outbrain, the user clicks an ad knowing he is going to watch a video, the video opens in a window, surrounded in a design, including a call for action button. This makes the users see the video from beginning to end (but the entry costs are more expensive than Facebook or Google).

Summary

I chose to take some advanced tools that the Outbrain ad system has and show that if a year or two ago, the system was focused only on content promotion, without advanced targeting  options, it now turned into an advanced system, which allows plenty of tools to reach the exact audiences and bring good results.

Today, if you don’t use the Outbrain tools to improve your digital campaigns, including serious use of their remarketing capabilities, you harm your campaigns, and you lose another advertising system that can bring about very good results.

About Me

Or Fialkov, 35, married to Inbal and father to Itamar and Aviv. CEO and owner of Fialkov Digital – a company expertising in Internet advertising in many diversified channels.

Trailblazer in Facebook campaign management, until today Facebook published 4 case studies about office clients. Writing professional articles, advising and mentoring large companies in advertising in the digital media, and owner of the largest digital group in Israel “Digital Ad Professionals”.