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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Taboola
Score 8.0 out of 10
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Taboola is a native advertising platform from the company of the same name in New York for publishing "recommended" content in a variety of popularly visited news sites and spaces. Taboola is partnered with many publishers (the Atlantic, Tribune, MailOnline, Business Insider, etc.).
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.
I think Taboola is great for either lead gen or for shopping product sites. I would definitely have a full-time person running the campaigns. If not managed properly, things can get out of hand with costs going up and conversion rates dropping.
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.
I have noticed that customer support has decreased in the past year as Taboola has grown. It sometimes takes four days or more for a campaign to be approved. It used to be immediate and always within 24 hours.
Credit card billing with high fees is now mandatory. If a company is going to make credit card billing mandatory don't charge fees. Our expense has increased by around 2.5% which I need to always keep in mind when comparing the CPC of campaigns on competing platforms.
Our customer support rep used to give us a lot of help with optimization. We stopped getting support from her over eight months ago and we recently got an email that we now have to contact support@taboola.com even though our spend had almost doubled! However, we just were informed that we will now have a new rep, hopefully we will get more support now. When I say support I mean a rep that contacts us with optimization ideas.
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.
It was pretty straightforward getting an account set up and having an account rep assigned. Compared to some other platforms Taboola is actually rather intuitive when it comes to navigating the user interface. Pixel implementation was easy and we didn't have any discrepancies tracking conversions. Also the ability to target LALs was very useful and semi-straightforward to upload.
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."
Support on Taboola has been great. We have always been in constant communication with their team and they have answered all of our questions and helped us when we had any issues or concerns.
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.
Taboola ranks pretty low for us, right next to Criteo and Revcontent, but above Traffic Junky. It's still nowhere as good as the social media platforms or Google. We selected Taboola because we had previously run ads years ago and wanted to see if we could make it profitable again. It offers more targeting options than Revcontent and Traffic Junky. I didn't care for the billing by credit card though. I would much prefer a net 15 or net 30 plan.
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.
Taboola guarantees stable user flow across the campaign period. I use balanced spending setting on my campaign so that the budget is well spread throughout the month, but usually, the traffic is higher nearing the end of the campaign.
New users and more awareness. Taboola allows us to reach potential readers without much hassle.
Users from Taboola are a high-quality audience who spend a lot of time on your website and read several pages. Unlikely to be bots.
