Outbrain, headquartered in New York with offices globally, is an internationally known native advertising platform for curating and publishing content across a variety of channels and media spaces, containing editorial controls, analytics for judging impact, and related features.
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Yahoo Native
Score 6.6 out of 10
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Yahoo Native (formerly Yahoo Gemini) is Yahoo's offering for mobile, native and search engine marketing and advertising (formerly Yahoo! Advertising and Yahoo! Search Marketing), for placing ads where visitors are, with an emphasis on mobile. The marketplace offers search and native advertising in one advertising platform, offering brand-safe premium content, and advanced technologies to deliver engaging advertising campaigns.
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.
As I've alluded to before, Yahoo Gemini! is particularly well-suited for that extra bit of marketing spend and those last few needed leads and MQLs to get you over the hump. We definitely find that the ROI is well worth it, but it's also not the type of channel that we're gonna drop half of our budget on. The scalability is limited to an extent.
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.
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.
More robust and sophisticated reporting capacity: front end metrics are available with different granularities, but lacking in insight to guide optimization strategy
No display/programmatic buying options as yet.
Audience targeting could be improved and audience / lookalike modeling could be improved. That said, geotargeting capabilities are very good.
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.
One of my main pain points with yahoo gemini is that the product is very difficult to use and the UI seems like they took a skeleton of a similar product and made it bare bones functional for the purpose of generating ad spend. It is a huge barrier for new customers and I feel one of the main reasons they have new customers at all is all the free trial dollars they offer.
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."
They were always super helpful during training and demoing and would answer any questions we had. We didn't have a direct account manager, which would have been nice, but I just don't think their size accommodates for that type of set up. They are very knowledgeable and help guide you through a set up for each particular client.
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.
Yahoo Gemini is a more robust version of Outbrain and Taboola. It does offer mobile search, which they do not, and you have more control over your targeting, ad formats, and platform preference. Difficulty of campaign setup is pretty minimal on any Native platform, but Gemini does seem to have the least strict approval process, which is nice with both Facebook and Twitter making it difficult to target and run ads for certain products/topics.
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.
