Native Advertising - Outbrain

Native advertising platforms are popular as businesses realise that the hard sell needs to be backed up with content that is informative, entertaining and/or relevant. Platforms like Outbrain allow businesses to reach and promote that content to large numbers of people, via ads that mimic links to real (non-paid) content on news and content websites.

Outbrain is filling that gap by working with many news/media sites as well as smaller blogs and websites. Based on the content that you’re advertising, it will determine the best audience to show the content to.

Your ads will appear as a thumbnail image and headline, usually placed below existing articles on media/news.90% of impressions on Outbrain’s network in New Zealand are on the two big Fairfax and NZME websites – NZHerald.co.nz and Stuff.co.nz

‍Strengths

• Outbrain is an effective way of getting exposure on major news websites because in NZ, it’s mainly Stuff and NZ Herald.
• Combined with good content, native advertising can be useful across all stages of the marketing funnel.
• Due to size constraints of the ad format, enormous reach in New Zealand, even larger than Google Display - think in the order of millions of impressions a month.

Weaknesses

• You do need to create some sort of content for your website - you can’t just send people to your homepage or a category page
• Outbrain demands a minimum spend in USD but there are ways to get around this
• Your brand won’t stand out as strongly as it would on other channels

Tips

• Review the block list frequently to block any low quality traffic sources.
• Try our minimum recommended setup which is at least three pieces of content, 5 different headlines for each content piece and 3 – 5 images for each piece of content.
• Because you’re sending people to an article, think about what you want them to do next and have a clear call to action e.g. promoting a lead magnet, email sign up or purchase - otherwise, they will just look at your article and leave your website.
• Outbrain now offers both Remarketing and Interest targeting options, which can help you reach the right people.

Need some help with Outbrain? Feel free to get in contact, we are happy to help.