Eric Siu and Neil Patel break down Outbrain and Taboola, native ad networks that place sponsored content on major publisher sites. They used to deliver cheap traffic, but click quality has dropped and surrounding ads often look sketchy. Neil's test: run it only if revenue per click beats your cost per click.
Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Siu.
And I'm Neil Patel.
And today we're gonna talk about should you be using Outbrain or Taboola? So quick overview for everyone, Outbrain or Taboola, these are networks where you can promote your content. It's basically like a content, you can call it a content delivery network. So, you know, the little content recommendations you see on the bottom of like a CNN.com or ESPN.com, they're often being ran by companies like Outbrain or Taboola. And in the very early days of Outbrain or Taboola, we're talking a couple years ago, you know, this actually seemed to be a viable source of traffic. And it still works for some people nowadays. But at the same time, you know, when you're putting all your content, um, on like, you know, ESPN or CNN, you know, sometimes you're getting a lot of unqualified clicks and, you know, these companies are, uh, just collecting your money. Now, one thing I'll also add too is In terms of like a quality filter for these services, sometimes you're gonna see gross stuff. Like you're gonna see pictures of like acne scars or like, you know, really gross like fruit that looks like alien-ish. So you have to think about from a branding aspect, if you have your content appearing next to these, it's not a really good reflection. And you can see that banner blindness might start to happen because, you know, when I see this stuff nowadays, I just tend to ignore it. But what I can say is, you know, a long time ago when I used Outbrain, when it was really cheap, We're talking maybe I was paying like a penny per click or so, that was worth it. Nowadays, I don't really touch this stuff anymore. I can do such a good job with Facebook and we can do a good job with Twitter or LinkedIn that we just don't really touch these.
The way you should think about any advertising channel is if you can make it cash flow positive, do them all. It's really that simple. If you can run ads on Outbrain and Taboola and whatever you pay per click, you can end up generating more revenue. Do them all day long. These days, Outbrain and Taboola are better suited for companies who are ad impression based because they're arbitraging ad impressions in which they're getting traffic from Taboola and Outbrain for less. And they're so optimized with their ad placements on their site that they're able to just arbitrage the traffic. The other type of Taboola and Outbrain ads that I'm seeing a lot are like, I hate to say it, more of the scammy ones. Kind of like, so-and-so friend searched them, or what is it called? Do you know what people can find about— do you know what people are learning about you when they're Googling your name or something like that? And then they'll drive you through all these questionnaires and just be like, oh, the results are going to be shocking. Are you willing to pay for it? Or I mean, are you okay? And then they'll charge you for it. Or some of their ads are just like, do you really know what your girlfriend or boyfriend is really up to? Right? Click here to find out. And like they're just scammy and they're just trying to make a quick buck off of advertising. And that's fine if you're okay with it and if those are the ads you want to run, you can probably be really profitable from Outbrain or Taboola, but in most cases you won't.
One interesting thing I've observed is from looking at these ads, I start to see the same things over and over. So it can mean 2 things. A, they're either really bad at advertising and they're not tracking their metrics, which probably is unlikely. Or number 2, or B, it's actually working really well for them. Because if you start to see the same ad over and over and over, we're talking for months or years at a time, you know it's probably working. And that's something to take from. And you can use a tool like Adbeat, for example. Or Adbeat would actually be a good example and probably a free tool we might give away in the future. But it's gonna allow you to see kind of competitors' ads, top-performing ads as well. And I think they also show you how people are spending on like Outbrain or maybe Jabula. But you can, you know, get an idea of how your competitors are doing too. Neil, anything else to add?
No, I'm pretty much good on my end.
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