Outbrain vs. PubMatic

Outbrain is well suited when you have the time to deal with all of its features and complexities. It allows you to customize the content and where your content will be promoted, as well as having a more sophisticated targeting feature. However, for the user like me, who is used to a simpler dashboard, Outbrain can be a tad too overwhelming.

Incentivized

Do not go with PubMatic -- every aspect of their company needs to improve and be tested on a higher scale for companies and organizations to be happy with their work. They need to listen to what clients are telling them to be able to improve their day to day functions.

• Provides additional reach through outlets your audience may live [in], but you wouldn't be able to target otherwise.
• Easy to use and implement. Wasn't much of a learning curve at all which can be very appealing when using promotional platforms like this.
• Great customer service response. They typically are very responsive in answering your questions and also have a general FAQ page to filter through if you aren't one to hop in the phone.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Communication is key and PubMatic really needs to improve the way they speak to clients and their response time on emails and the time lapse between communication. Turn around time needs to improve. Simple requests like forecasting should not take weeks to turn around.
• Understanding their product before making it available to a huge organization. Don't use companies as guinea pigs when the product isn't even working. Understand what your client expects from you from the very beginning.
• Don't place blame where blame isn't warranted.
• Knowing the terminology you're speaking about well before you have a conference call.

We have already cancelled.

The use case is very obvious, brand awareness and low cost conversions because of its reach in billions. The platform is easy to use, well sorted and defined with good click optimized algorithms and brands can use it without hesitation. If monitored well and optimized accordingly, this can prove to be one of the best advertising channels.

Incentivized

We had an account manager assigned to us, but they really didn't offer too much help outside of the financial side of things. We used the self-serve platform with mild suggestions every few weeks from our reps amounting to "spend a bit more here."

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

We regret using PubMatic and are happy with our choice to move forward onto a better company.

• More Impressions - We were able to increase the number of impressions we get from display advertising by adding this new space, which is in addition to the typical skyscraper ads we've done.
• More Visibility - We've been working on ideas to improve branding, and Outbrain did provide an additional space to advertise in.

Incentivized

• Increased problem areas
• Decreased productivity.