Outbrain Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services Reviews & Insights

Score5 out of 10

37 Reviews and Ratings

Community insights

TrustRadius Insights for Outbrain are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.

Pros

User-Friendly Interface: Several users have found Outbrain's user interface to be easy and simple to use, allowing for quick campaign creation. They appreciate the straightforward navigation within the platform, resulting in a smooth overall experience. With minimal learning curve involved, users can easily navigate through the clean and intuitive dashboard.

Cost Savings: Some users have noted that Outbrain's CPCs are comparatively lower when compared to other Social Native platforms. This has led to potential cost savings for these users, making Outbrain an affordable option for their advertising needs.

Quality Traffic Generation: Despite initial concerns about native ads being spammy, many users have been pleasantly surprised by the decent quality of traffic generated through Outbrain's platform. They appreciate that Outbrain's comprehensive distribution network allows them to reach outlets frequented by their target audience but would otherwise be difficult to target. This additional reach helps increase visibility in the marketplace and provides valuable exposure to their content.

Outbrain Reviews

10 Reviews

Professional, Scientific, and Technical ServicesMarketing & Advertising9Research1

Outbrain Is Worth It - If You Have Budget and Patience

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

July 14, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

AdRizer is one of the leading native agencies in South Florida. We utilize Outbrain on a daily basis with our team of 10+ buyers. Averaging well into millions of spend months with consistent results.

The account manager assigned to us answers at all hours of the day, just yesterday Alexa Cupo answered a lengthy email after 8 pm. This kind of white-glove commitment to their clients is the reason we continue to use it.

It does take some time (at first) to build data, working with your account manager will make this process run seamlessly. Personally, Outbrain is preferred over its competitors.

If you are an e-commerce store wanting to push your products onto new ad stacks I would highly suggest giving Outbrain a test.

Pros

Communications
Easy Navigation
CBS Strategies

Cons

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

Best suited: Companies with a larger budget who are willing to spend to test before seeing revenue. Building a funnel in Outbrain from scratch for e-commerce can take time.

Less appropriate: Companies with little to no budget that demand instant results.

Tyler Torcivia

Digital Strategist in Marketing at Adrizer (Marketing & Advertising, 11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

Great for getting eyeballs, but very low ROI if you're looking for direct conversions!

Rating: 4 out of 10

Incentivized

September 22, 2020

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We have used Outbrain on and off again for over 4 years. We started using it for a select few clients before rolling it out as a fully managed service offering within the paid realm. It was great at driving traffic initially but we found that the traffic was very top of funnel or came through as an accidental click and had a very low propensity to actually convert.

Pros

Traffic
Increasing views/sessions
Get more exposure to valuable content

Cons

Targeting outside of specific websites or niches
Value of traffic
Outdated admin

Likelihood to Recommend

Outbrain great for driving visitors and sessions. If impressions is what you're looking for this will work well. If you're looking for bottom-funnel conversions, I would likely recommend you focus on platforms that enable better targeting and more audience limitations. Outbrain worked well to get eyeballs but not actually driving $$ for us and our clients.

Verified User

Manager in Marketing (Marketing & Advertising company, 51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

4 years of experience

Does What You Want It To Do

Rating: 6 out of 10

Incentivized

September 14, 2020

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Our current use of Outbrain is to reach possible new members for our credit union. We target and advertise to those via Outbrain that are the most likely to engage with us later on. Outbrain is used more as a brand awareness tool to get more of a passing interest in what our credit union offers.

Pros

Easy to use overall, no major hiccups.
Initial set up is fairly simple.
Outbrain's distribution network is great and pretty comprehensive.

Cons

The terms and conditions of the platform can vary and change rapidly, what works one time might not work a second later.
Customer service representatives can sometimes be hard to get a hold of.

Likelihood to Recommend

Outbrain is well suited when you need a fairly straightforward tool that helps get brand awareness out to places on the internet that you might not show up other than through Outbrain. It is a simple(ish) tool that allows increasing brand reach with a beginner to intermediate skill set. Though not the be all end all, it covers a lot of bases well.

Chandler Elmore

Community Development & Engagement Lead in Marketing at Blue Federal Credit Union (Marketing and Advertising, 201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

View profile

Delivers Average Traffic at a Great Value

Rating: 7 out of 10

Incentivized

November 5, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We utilize Outbrain as primarily an awareness channel for a pretty diverse mix of clients/industries. It's currently only being used by the paid media team. It is a great platform to get a lot of users to your site relatively affordably. While it has some limitations in terms of content, most of the guidelines are straightforward and are not subject to the random disapproval that is becoming more common in the larger social platforms.

Pros

Easy, simple to use interface that can create campaigns pretty quickly.
Comparatively lower CPCs when compared to other Social/Native platforms.
Surprisingly decent quality of traffic. As spammy as some native ads can seem, we've received quality leads when using this platform at scale.

Cons

Ad formats are not very customizable, limited on how your ad appears.
Billing setup can be a pain if you're working worth multiple accounts.
Targeting is pretty vague, not sure who the audience really is, need to monitor traffic using the platform such as GA to ensure it's not too spammy.

Likelihood to Recommend

If your client or organization is running a high volume awareness campaign, Outbrain would be a platform to diversify your mix with. Pretty low maintenance and easy to set up, you can get ads running in a few minutes. If your primary goal is conversions, there are probably better channels you can use where the targeting is a little more transparent and would likely see a higher avg conversion rate.

Vincent Misiewicz

Sr. Search Engine Marketing Analyst in Marketing at Traffic Digital Agency (Marketing and Advertising, 11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

5 years of experience

View profile

Outbrain: Endless Possibilities, If You Have the Time

Rating: 4 out of 10

Incentivized

May 17, 2018

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Outbrain to distribute content pieces on our blog onto advertising channels for increased impressions and exposure. We write content which is useful to everyone, and we distribute the content on the Outbrain network to increase readership on our blog and awareness for our brand. Overall, Outbrain provides us with an audience for the content we write relating to our product offerings.

Pros

Distribution Network - We are able to appear on a very wide variety of websites in a more organic way than through traditional display advertising.
Ease of Use - The Outbrain platform was incredibly simple from set-up to optimization. The dashboard is clean, easy-to-use, and very trainable to other team members.
Unique - We found very few comparable services (other than Taboola), and getting into this space of advertising puts you in a completely different view than the typical sidebar or skyscraper ads.

Cons

Customer Service - Speaking to a human is nearly impossible, there is no "chat" function, and no phone number immediately available. Ultimately, I've had to email a generic CS contact and wait several days before heading back.
High Number of Guidelines - The number of guidelines one must meet before using Outbrain is much higher than any other ad platform I've used. Most of them are highly specific and not necessarily items that a website would have out-of-the-box.

Likelihood to Recommend

We haven't found the value to be worth the effort it takes to work through the long list of editorial guidelines necessary to pass through the review stage. While valuable exposure can be gained from Outbrain, it is a lengthy process to prep your website or blog for the Outbrain requisites. However, if you already have a fully prepared website, and are in need of impressions apart from traditional advertising, Outbrain could be beneficial.

Verified User

Employee in Marketing (Marketing and Advertising company, 11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

Outbrain - Content Distribution Hit or Miss

Rating: 6 out of 10

Incentivized

September 15, 2017

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We used Outbrain to explain the reach of some of our most popular [content] with a goal of trying to attract visitors to the website who have yet to engage with the company and our work. Although we don't typically use software like this, we decided to give it a shot and see if it proved successful.

Pros

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.

Cons

Targeting a specific audience doesn't really exist. This creates a frustration because you sorta have your hands tied as to how Outbrain selects who sees it.
Would like some optimization feedback on the ads we put out. If there is something that can be improved upon, give me a hint, or, maybe the content I'm putting out just isn't going to attract new audiences.
It would be nice to see some sort of integration with Outbrain and HubSpot as well.

Likelihood to Recommend

This seems like it might work better with more evergreen content that doesn't get too granular. Not very good if you are trying to target a specific audience, or even test it for that matter.

Christine Austin

Creative Lead, Marketing in Marketing at Impact Branding & Design LLC (Marketing and Advertising, 11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

View profile

Outbrain Review

Rating: 6 out of 10

Incentivized

March 28, 2017

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Outbrain was used to enhance the reach of a client's content campaign through sponsored links in articles relevant to the content.

Pros

Large network of sites
Good ad format
Large network of sites allows for good amplification of content

Cons

Reporting not as robust as would have liked
End user quality not as high as anticipated
Expensive pricing method

Likelihood to Recommend

Well suited to amplify content across large networks of sites
Not suited to smaller budget campaigns

Eamonn Kelly

Senior Analyst in Marketing at UM Worldwide (Marketing and Advertising, 1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

View profile

Outbrain for Content Amplification and Traffic

Rating: 5 out of 10

Incentivized

September 28, 2016

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use outbrain for content amplification. Outbrain is used by our search team to increase traffic to website blogs.

Pros

Outbrain is on a CPC model, so they are great if you want people to visit your article rather than just see an ad.
Outbrain is good at helping create article titles for advertising purposes.

Cons

The outbrain platform was not user friendly in my opinion.
Reporting was difficult. Many of the reports I needed, needed to be pulled by a rep.

Likelihood to Recommend

Outbrain is appropriate when you want someone to click to an article and read the blog. It is useful to increase traffic to your blog and website. It is less useful for a direct response client, where you are driving a particular conversion.

Verified User

Strategist in Marketing (Marketing and Advertising company, 51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

Has Outbrain lost it's native edge?

Rating: 5 out of 10

Incentivized

November 11, 2015

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We currently use Outbrain across clients that want to drive awareness of their blog / content. We primarily use it where clients want to increase traffic to their site as this is a metric clients are looking to increase year over year (YOY). We don't tend to use it on all clients as it really does depend on their main KPI for each campaign.

Pros

Drives relatively cheap traffic to content pages or articles on other sites that might have been written.
Platform is simple to use and easy to navigate. Working within an agency we see multiple platforms from different suppliers and Outbrain is one of the most simple.
Customer service has got better over the last year or so. We were originally on a managed service, it was good but when we moved to self serve it was quite poor, however now they are very fast to respond.

Cons

Optimisation within the platform is poor for this type of technology - you can't set ads to evenly rotate so you can see which piece of content is performing best. Only real things you can change are CPCs and budget . Nothing to do with site placement, frequency etc., etc. It auto optimisies to what Outbrain thinks is the top performing and ignores the rest but this isn't what you always want.
Reporting suite on the back of the optimisations is poor - can't manually get sitelists / impressions. Geo targeting / frequency / audience profiling can't be got.
No ranking of ads - don't know what's good / bad about the ads to help optimise new titles / content/.
Only send through to certain bits of content - this can be quite strict.

Likelihood to Recommend

It is not suited for test / trial pieces of content, we find that it works better for how-tos or top 10s. You need to make sure you find out what the content is before you promote it and if you want to do any testing as Outbrain isn't really the best for testing things.

Verified User

Director in Marketing (Marketing and Advertising company, 51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

Value of Outbrain for Nonprofit Content Distribution

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

October 27, 2015

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Outbrain is used to promote content on our blog to a wide audience. Because we are a nonprofit, we don't have an immediate sales goal, but instead have used the tool to greatly increase our overall traffic. In the last month, we have also used the tool's ability to optimize for conversions to try and increase the number of email addresses we can capture from the content.

Pros

Gets content to new audiences. It's a great tool for acquiring new visitors at the top of the funnel.
Outbrain team is easy to work with and will share best practices and tips. That's helped improve our campaigns over time.
The tool is easy to use. Just choose your content, add headlines and photos and let the algorithm do its job.

Cons

There isn't really targeting available, which I've had to remind senior leadership of a bit. I don't think that needs to be changed, but they could provide talking points to help sell to senior leadership.
The content does cast a wide net, so you might need to do some tweaking to get a relevant audience. The optimization feature has helped.

Likelihood to Recommend

It's appropriate if your product or cause could potentially appeal to a wide audience, or if that's your goal. It's not ideal for very targeted or specific goals. Use the conversion optimization feature to help reach the right audience, but know that feature is more expensive. Overall it is on the pricey side compared with Facebook, for example, but provides access to a huge audience.

Verified User

Account Manager in Marketing (Research company, 51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

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Outbrain: Endless Possibilities, If You Have the Time

Rating: 4 out of 10

Incentivized

May 17, 2018

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Pros

Distribution Network - We are able to appear on a very wide variety of websites in a more organic way than through traditional display advertising.
Ease of Use - The Outbrain platform was incredibly simple from set-up to optimization. The dashboard is clean, easy-to-use, and very trainable to other team members.
Unique - We found very few comparable services (other than Taboola), and getting into this space of advertising puts you in a completely different view than the typical sidebar or skyscraper ads.

Cons

Customer Service - Speaking to a human is nearly impossible, there is no "chat" function, and no phone number immediately available. Ultimately, I've had to email a generic CS contact and wait several days before heading back.
High Number of Guidelines - The number of guidelines one must meet before using Outbrain is much higher than any other ad platform I've used. Most of them are highly specific and not necessarily items that a website would have out-of-the-box.

Likelihood to Recommend

Verified User

Employee in Marketing (Marketing and Advertising company, 11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience