Outbrain

What Stevin gets out of Outbrain

Outbrain is one of the largest native platforms in the world and places your content as a recommendation beneath articles on premium publishers. For awareness and traffic that delivers a scale you will not easily get elsewhere. The honest story is that the scale also carries noise: native recommendations draw plenty of clicks, but not all from people with serious interest, and the contribution to your funnel is hard to pin down. We see advertisers stall on this: the traffic comes in, but it sits apart from the performance channels and there is no view of what that content eventually sets in motion. The platform delivers volume, not the interpretation. Stevin runs as a layer on top, reads the results through the API and puts the native campaign in your total attribution. A person sees the conclusion first, then comes a decision about budget.

What you pair it with

Choosing Outbrain gives you reach at scale, but that reach comes with noise and with traffic that sits apart from your real conversion channels. Count on a connection with your tracking and attribution, otherwise you are measuring clicks with no context. The data is available through the API. The real question is what all that traffic does in your funnel, because native easily draws clicks that lead nowhere. Without something that lays the quality of that traffic next to your other channels, you are paying for volume instead of for effect.

Common mistakes

• →Steering on click volume while native draws a lot of noise and loose clicks.
• →Letting native sit apart from your performance channels, so no view of the funnel impact.
• →Assuming a lot of traffic is the same as valuable traffic.
• →Raising budget without laying the quality of the traffic next to other channels.