This post was co-written by: @AndrewMeyer8 & @AudreyBloemer at Seer Interactive.
Back in 2013, Seer began testing the use of content distribution networks to help promote assets and valuable content across the web. Our goal was to test a variety of distribution networks to determine the best ways to pay for promotion on client content and assets. Overall, we wanted to test the impact paid content promotion had on assets that we had previously launched and to measure the impact of this traffic on the high-level goals of each client.
For those of you unfamiliar with this form of content marketing, content distribution networks are quickly becoming powerful tools for engaging new audiences and expanding the reach of creative content. This method for online advertising provides content within the context of a user's experience, making the native advertising feel less intrusive and more like part of a discovery process, all while increasing the odds that users will click-through.
The native ads appear at the bottom of well-known content sources like Time, CNN, USA Today, ESPN & the Huffington Post, and are served to users based on a variety of algorithms. This reduces the feeling of actually seeing an ad, as users are captured when they finish digesting other content and feel they have discovered the promoted content naturally.
What started out as a $10k intern-led test for Seer has expanded into a full-blown service offering for current clients that we're working hard to improve every day. Wil Reynolds also presented on this during SearchLove London. With a growing amount of data across multiple networks, we'd like to:
- Compare overall stats for a few content distribution platforms
- Share the results from some of our most recent campaigns
- Offer tips to help you maximize the ROI on your campaigns
- Provide feedback on some of the content platforms we've used, researched or tested
- Share a few tests we'll be running in 2015!
Content distribution networks to test
Below are the metrics we have across multiple clients and niches for networks with significant data to report on. This includes a mix of mobile, tablet and desktop advertising, but we've also broken it out individually. Since conversions vary across all our clients, we'll report on specific conversion metrics in a later section. Across almost 1 billion impressions, here are the metrics we've seen.
Overall metrics by network
* Seer used nRelate throughout 2014 to promote content that was niche-specific to tech, computers/gaming, and gadgets. In December 2014, nRelate announced they would be shutting down after five years in the industry.
While we did use separate platforms for different verticals, clients and niches, visitors coming from Outbrain tended to be more engaged. Typically these visitors from Outbrain were also more familiar with those brands and were not new visitors. We typically used Taboola to promote newer clients with less marketing reach and therefore the higher new visitor percentage and bounce rates are to be expected.
Comparing mobile vs. desktop
We've seen higher engagement rates for lower costs on mobile devices across both networks. When a client has a responsive, mobile-friendly site and a positive user experience on mobile we always recommend testing mobile campaigns.
We usually start by separating the audiences into two campaigns, one targeting mobile/tablet users and one targeting desktop users so we can monitor performance, CPCs and spend on an individual level. This allows us to get the best bang for our buck.
Tracking conversions & ROI on goal-specific campaigns
Building a holistic campaign for conversions
Goal Set: Promote one landing page for a large client in the B2B product industry targeted at small business owners using a holistic campaign across native advertising, Google Display Network (GDN), Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and outreach. The goal was to help generate 10 total conversions, with a goal CPA of $1,200 or less.
Results & ROI: Below is a breakdown of our results from this campaign, outlined by source, total percent of our spend, the sessions this spend drove and the percent of conversions for our campaign. Overall, we were able to reduce our CPA to $64.22 from the paid promotion efforts.
We spent the most with Taboola and it also drove the highest number of sessions. While Twitter spend was lower than three of the other channels, we were able to achieve a 10.53% conversion rate for the users we were able to drive to the site.
Despite Taboola having the lowest conversion rate, it was able to generate the largest percentage of conversions because of its ability to drive large quantities of traffic.
Improvements for Next Time: Next time, we'd like to better optimize our titles from paid distribution to target the demographics of our audience. We were looking for brand awareness and exposure, but could have altered our titles sooner to better target the niche market we were targeting which was small business owners.
Brand awareness & link building
Goal Set: Use Taboola to promote six content blogs from a recognized food brand to generate 5,000 visits for brand awareness & get 10 sites to link back to our content.
Results & ROI:
We ended up spending about $2,000 including setup time & spend, and drove over 11,000 clicks at a CTR of 0.055% to these posts. Over 6 posts, we saw an additional 1,000+ social shares and 82 new referring domains, or about $24.39/link. We also saw 31% higher pages/visit and a 28% lower bounce rate than our average campaign metrics.
Since the blog posts were all new and no outreach had begun, we were able to attribute the linking domains to paid distribution. Combined with the social shares, blog post comments and other goal completions throughout the site, we were very happy with the ROI for this campaign.
Important Note: Directly correlating links to content distribution networks can be difficult, so we recommend testing this with brand new blog posts, prior to any outreach, and using tracked URLs to differentiate traffic/conversions from the distribution networks. This also works best when you're promoting relevant and sharable assets in the right industries.
Improvements for Next Time: If we had redone this campaign, we would have made the embed links and social sharing buttons on the landing page more accessible and easier to use. The content we were promoting was timely, so the pickup was much better than if had we promoted during a down time.
Goal completions and lead completions
Goal Set: Promote asset from a prominent B2B company to increase lead generation.
Results & ROI:
Through Taboola, we were able to promote the content on high quality sites like Entrepreneur and CNN Money. In less than one month, we drove 8,348 new visits at an average CPC of $0.32 and saw a 2.31% conversion rate, leading to 205 overall goal completions.
Improvements for Next Time: In the future, we'd recommend tracking additional assisted conversion goals to more accurately report ROI to the client. The page we promoted only had one clear CTA, so we also recommended including more prominent secondary CTAs such as social shares and PDF downloads to further increase the ROI and get visitors to complete additional actions on the page.
10 steps to better maximize your ROI
- Use Custom Tracking URLs & Parameters - Setting up parameters for your landing page URLs can help you track ROI all the way down to specific images or titles. Platforms typically offer the ability to include parameters on campaigns, but we'd recommend testing down to the image & title level as this can also help you determine which titles brought in more qualified traffic. By placing custom tracking on your embed links, you can also better track the link building results of your content promotion.
- Set Goals Prior to Launching a Campaign - Setting goals is a great way to both measure the success of your promotion and make improvements for the following campaigns. This will also help you to manage expectations for yourself and your clients.
- Include Micro Conversions on Landing Pages - Micro conversions help to track additional ROI from your content distribution. Maybe email signups or following your brand on social are valuable micro conversions for your business. These can also lead to additional reporting values once the campaign closes.
- Use Event Tracking on Landing Pages - Event tracking is by far the most useful method we have for tracking micro conversions. These can be assigned a variety of fields for a more granular analysis. We expand further on this process here.
- A/B TEST! - We can't mention this enough, but regardless of the goals behind your campaign, always set up some sort of A/B test. At a minimum test a few different titles and images on each piece of content you decided to promote. You can also test landing pages performance and optimize your pages for conversions! Setting a daily cap on your campaigns allows you to decipher the data and make changes before spending your entire budget in a day!
- Set a Daily Cap & Don't Be Afraid to Cut It Off - Setting a daily cap on your campaigns allows you to decipher the data and make changes before spending your entire budget in less than a day. Also, don't be afraid to cut off a campaign if the results are underwhelming. Usually two or three days of data is enough to tell if it's worth your time and investment. Cut it off and regroup with better titles, images or new content all together.
- Add a Static Content Widget Below Your Own Content - When we tested paid promotion vs. PPC, we found that on average, content distribution networks had an 8% higher bounce rate. In order to combat high bounce rates, perhaps include a custom widget at the bottom of your posts to keep users on your site. How did people end up finding your articles? Through the "read more" or "you may like" sections below content pieces! You can either hardcode additional blog posts at the bottom or rotate your most popular articles to help keep users on your site and engaged with your brand's content.
- Use Your Data to Inform Future Decisions - Once you A/B test titles, images and landing pages, measure the success of each campaign and use that data to inform future content and marketing decisions. If certain titles or images resonated well with your audience, update the posts you promoted and use this knowledge to help make future decisions. You can even use the data to inform your PPC decisions as well!
- Write Titles to Better Target Demographics - With most content distribution networks, you can't target by demographic or interest. One way to better utilize your spend is to speak directly to your audience with your campaign titles and images. In one campaign, we were looking to target 35-45 year old mothers for a contest and used CTAs in our titles that were focused directly at moms.
- Implement Social Sharing Numbers and Prep for the Residual - We've found that making your social sharing buttons more prominent and including social sharing counters led to an exponential increase in shares. Also, prepare for residual traffic after you pause a promotion. Looking at the cumulative traffic to five landing pages of a recent campaign, we saw an additional 15,540 visits to these pages over six weeks, from social and new backlink referrals, after the promotion ended. If you've found the right audiences that share via social, the reach for the campaign continues to grow even after the promotion ends.
Features for each distribution network
Seer POV: Overall, we've found that this platform is highly scalable as you can send a higher quantity of traffic more quickly than others at a lower cost. In terms of quality of traffic, bounce rates compared to Outbrain are slightly higher and on average users spend less time on site than Outbrain visitors. However, depending on niche, Taboola can outperform Outbrain.
Pros: Generally less-expensive CPCs than other platforms, easier to upload content, images and titles, well-respected news and content publishers.
Cons: Can't edit multiple campaigns or multiple titles/images at once, somewhat outdated admin/backend platform, and inability to pull native ad examples appearing in the wild.
Seer POV: Along with Taboola, this is one of Seer's favorite distribution networks. One intriguing development for Outbrain is they recently became the sole provider of content distribution for Time.com, which makes their platform more appealing to advertisers like ourselves in 2015.
In terms of quality of traffic, Outbrain generally sends fewer visitors to the site for the same cost as Taboola, but users are more engaged and tend to have a higher conversion rate.
Pros: Better post-click results in our tested campaigns and easy uploading system.
Cons: The self-service admin is also a little difficult to use. Can't pull large data sets from the admin, so when comparing to a Twitter or Pinterest Analytics dashboard, there is definitely room for improvement!
Seer POV: Gravity once had a substantial monthly minimum, which caused us to initially forgo testing in 2014. Now that the threshold has been lowered, we've started planning initial campaigns for Q1 of 2015. Some of their larger network sites include Wordpress, AOL, Forbes & exclusivity with the Huffington Post. Gravity also has some niche specific sites that might work well for auto, beauty and sports content. We'll follow up once we have statistics to share.
Seer POV: ZergNet operates differently than the other distribution networks, as it is not yet monetized. It's free to work with ZergNet, but you're required to have a widget placed on your site to promote your article (along with others), that sends traffic to the ZergNet homepage. The problem with this model is that it's a 1:1 relationship and you must push traffic from your site to Zergnet in order to capitalize. If you are looking for a CPC mode,l you will not find it here. While a CPC model is not yet available, there are plans to potentially expand to this in 2015.
Seer POV: Initially, there were high monthly minimums for spend, however if you upload funds via a credit card, then there are no monthly minimums. The biggest advantages we see is here is the ability to target based on interests (other content networks use an algorithm that advertisers can't control) and implement retargeting for ads. Publishers include Forbes, VentureBeat, Parade, Bloomberg, Answers.com and more.
Seer POV: Zemanta has moved away from their old platform to promote content at scale across multiple content networks. They'll aggregate your content into multiple ad formats, then use platforms like Outbrain, Adblade, Gravity, and Disqus to promote them at scale. We prefer to work directly with each platform for more transparency and control over campaign optimizations.
Others we've reviewed, but not yet tested:
What's next? What we're testing in 2015
2015 is going to be another big year for content marketing, especially as digital continues to grow into a more holistic marketing channel. As we shown above, we've spent a lot of time testing out various networks and strategies in 2014 and are excited to continue the push in 2015, specifically on paid social promotion combined with content distribution.
Content promotion is more than just building links; it's about doing #RCS and running integrated campaigns to drive engagement and interest in your business. During the course of the year we worked closely with one of our largest ecommerce clients to support several marketing campaigns.
The goal was to drive engagement with the assets created and ultimately to drive users to complete the desired conversion action, which was a combination of signups and downloads. The results of this campaign led us to put more emphasis on this holistic approach.
While not all social networks have the scale of the content distribution networks, their targeting abilities more than make up for it. You can see that overall conversion rates are much higher with relatively comparable CPCs. While, setting up multiple, A/B tested social campaigns is a more tedious process and slightly more costly compared to content networks, the results we've seen when compared 1:1 to content distribution are promising.
Lastly, since Pinterest just opened up their ad platform to businesses in January, we'd like to start combining content distribution with concurrent Pinterest promotion to determine how Pinterest ads stack up against the variety of other distribution platforms. We're already seeing quite a significant ROI in our initial test, with CPCs ranging from $0.20 - 0.25 and CTRs around 0.15% - 0.20%.
Do you have any data to share on other content distribution networks? Are there any other networks we should be testing in 2015? We'd love to hear your comments below or feel free to reach out via Twitter - @AndrewMeyer8 & @AudreyBloemer!
Great insight and quite a few paid amplification services I had not seen - Gravity looks interesting.
One question, would you include Stumbleupon Paid Ads - within the this group of services? Whilst it's probably an under performer for more lead gen focused pieces, it can certainly be a massive boost when it comes to pushing content you already know performs. It's not uncommon to see upwards of 100k visitors from just a small $50-$100 spend. Although bounce rates are significant... as you can expect.
I personally find the back end of Outbrain's system very clunky when compared to Taboola so when I'm working with lots of campaign it really pushes me in favor of Taboola. So if anyone from Outbrain is reading this - please make it more like Taboola :)
Thanks for the feedback regarding our back end. I can definitely understand some of your frustrations, as I manage campaigns for our company blog. I am, however, extremely excited about improvements in usability and design that are soon to be revealed, as well other plans for the platform in 2015. I'd love to connect directly to get more specifics about how you think we can do better and share some of our future plans. You can email me at wfleiss at outbrain.com. Thanks Danny!
Thanks Will for getting in touch.
We are certainly going to keep using Outbrain - as the report above shows and our personal experience is that you guys have really high quality traffic and publishers.
But also wanted to be clear on what goes through my mind when i have to load small $$ projects on both - and Taboola for ease of use currently wins out.
Look forward to the improvements :)
Thanks Danny! It's really helpful to get this feedback. Hit me up anytime you need help with anything.
Hey Danny, thanks for reading! We'd consider Stumble ads a good supplement to this category of "paid discovery". You pretty much hit the nail on the head though. We've seen Stumble drive a lot of visitors at a quick rate for customers but we've also pulled our ads early in some cases because of the poor traffic we've received.
Audrey and Drew, thanks for this very interesting set of data! Mozzers, this post combined with this recent one on Everything You Need to Know About Sponsored Content -- it's another study on a similar (but not the same) marketing practice -- make a good pair.
However, I must admit one thing: No matter how good the ROI, I'm not sure that I'd ever use distribution networks. After I finish reading an article somewhere and then see that block of junk at the end, I feel like I have entered a swamp. That block of junk always contains the worst click-bait headlines combined with pandering to the worst of the worst with content on sex, celebrities, health scares, and financial scares -- no matter what the topic of the website or article I'm happening to be reading. It's seems like the Weekly World News of marketing tactics.
I feel like I've waded into a putrid swamp, and I would not want my brand -- or the brands of any clients -- to be associated with that. I think it might create a bad brand association. Say that I have a quality high-tech SaaS product and people come to my landing page from that block of junk. I think that they'd be less likely to submit an inquiry just because they'd have a subconscious bias towards not taking the brand seriously based on where they first heard about it.
Of course, maybe I'm the only one who feels this way. Perhaps the block of junks' algorithms just seem to think I like seeing that stuff (though I utterly despise it) -- and other people see more-valuable content. I don't know, but I'd love to hear what people think!
Distribution networks are not for everyone. I syndicate my websites' RSS feed on high authority news sites and the average person doesn't think like we do. They see an interesting post title and they are not concerned about the "junk at the end". They just click.
I must admit one thing: No matter how good the ROI, I'm not sure that I'd ever use distribution networks.
I feel like I've waded into a putrid swamp, and I would not want my brand -- or the brands of any clients -- to be associated with that.
Samuel, here are a couple thoughts about that....
I was running these types of ads on my website - at the bottom of the content page as they recommend. I was amazed by the number of people who clicked these ads. I was getting paid as lots of visitors left my site, but the pay rate was not very good.
What bothered me the most was... I was showing these stinky ads to the most valuable people on my website - the people who read one of my articles to the end or at least scanned the entire article. Then I sold these visitors for pennies each.
My decision was to stop running these ads and instead promote my own best content at the bottom of the articles. Keep those most valuable visitors on my own site.
From the advertisers viewpoint. Yes, their content can be positioned between stinky stuff. On the other hand they are getting their ads in front of the premium premium visitors for not a lot of money.
I am not advocating these services. Just saying that they are smartly positioned to steal very high quality visitors.
My decision was to stop running these ads and instead promote my own best content at the bottom of the articles. Keep those most valuable visitors on my own site. Just like real estate you need to discern the highest and best use for your property i.e. web traffic. Sometimes affiliates are a better solution than adwords or other programs that pay you per click. One of the fundamentals of internet marketing is visitor arbitrage.
Thanks Oldest! We actually included that in #7 above, that once you bring visitors to a landing page, that you might want to test a static widget of your own that keeps users on your page and continues their discovery journey. Its important to note that all these tests above refer to the advertiser side and not the publisher side. Thanks for the continued interest!
I was showing these stinky ads to the most valuable people on my website - the people who read one of my articles to the end or at least scanned the entire article. Then I sold these visitors for pennies each. My decision was to stop running these ads and instead promote my own best content at the bottom of the articles. Keep those most valuable visitors on my own site.
Upvoted because that's a very important point!
In any business and marketing strategy, there are considerations for short-term and long-term benefits and ROI.
In this example, I concur -- why send a visitor away to another site for a few pennies when it's likely much more valuable to keep them on your own site for longer? That way, you're more likely to get them to buy your product, follow you on social media, subscribe to your feed, share your content, and do myriad other actions (based on your desired marketing goals).
Samuel, I totally agree with your point here. I can't stand those articles and it always makes me question the credibility of the site I am on. Like "is it really worth it to send your readers to these crappy links?" I tend so see a lot of clickbait headlines like "credit card myths" or "the one thing you need to do to be a millionaire" and stupid things like that. Even though a lot of times they are next to credible sources, I just can't trust the group.
If you notice now - the clever CPA guys are creating pure content sites for outbrain and taboola and then using secondary networks that don't care what stuff you post - to direct them to the lead pages... that the big networks won't touch anymore. Personally i think neither approach will work long term but I assuming those involved right now are making big bucks.
Lots of value in this article, but I still can't see myself venturing into this type of advertising (which is what this is) when I can lead organic tactics that, if done well, can have even greater return. I have to agree with Samuel here - maybe others see valuable content in these scenarios, but I only ever see junk.
I'm reminded of one of my favorite quotes about advertising vs marketing that I HAVE TO share. Take no offense advertisers! ;)
“Advertising is a dog drinking beer, a fat moron falling down the stairs, a snot-nosed brat kicking his rapping grandpa in his testicles. I am in marketing, Winston, the backbone of capitalism. Without it, you’d be dead in two days.” - Schmidt, New Girl
Thanks for the read, Sam. We did like your post this week on Owned & Earned Media!
We look at content distribution as another part of the holistic content marketing strategy. You mention that "the content marketing strategy for your own website should focus on organic search and your sales funnel". The types of content we're promoting are optimized for search and each campaign has a goal, which could be eyes on the prize, conversions, a step in the sales funnel, social shares, etc.
It really comes down to the platforms you use, what your content is about and what websites your content is being shown on. We don't think it's fair to say that the networks are spammy. It comes down to the advertiser and unfortunately there are those out there that would do anything for a click. We find that the networks are getting better at managing their own brand and steering away from some of the poorer advertisers. Outside the networks we discussed there are a ton of additional networks that do focus on these types of advertisers though which would explain why you do see those.
At the end of the day, if we have content appearing on Business Insider, CNN, Time, etc and we're gaining valuable exposure from interested users, with well-written, helpful content/assets/articles & no damage to our client's reputation, achieving a nice ROI for clients is what we were hired to do!
Thanks for the comment -- I'm glad you liked my essay!
I really hate to sound negative, but I'm hoping to foster some objective discussion on the issue.
Frankly, I see little value in publishers adding such content-distribution networks to their sites. Unless you've got traffic in the millions of hits like Fark or Reddit, you're probably going to make very little money. And just based on the type of content that I've seen to appear, it can -- but not always -- reflect badly on your brand. Do I want my website visitors to be constantly reminded of the "ten signs that you're going to have a heart attack"?
Plus, it makes the sites load more slowly.
And from an advertiser perspective, the branding issue runs two ways. Sure, a sponsored link may appear on an authoritative site like CNN in general, but it will also immediately appear at the bottom or in the sidebar next to links from sites that are, to be blunt, crap. And the positioning of a company's links right next to those specific links reflects badly on the company.
Plus, there seems to be little quality control. Say I have a kid who is reading CNN. Do I want him to see and click to articles like "5 Celebrities Who Had Bad Boob Jobs" and "The Sexiest Celebrity Wardrobe Malfunctions"?
It poisons the whole Internet.
Thanks for this guys - a lot of information here. It seems that you set very specific goals which were then crucial for not only analysis but also identifying where the campaign could be improved in the future. I like the fact that you have not breezed over the A/B testing and also considering titles because if your image/title does not attract the user then you have already lost in your quest of CTR and therefore conversions, unlikely to get it spot on the first time so adjustments are necessary!
Cheers
Simon
Hey Simon! Thanks for reading and appreciate the feedback. We love testing titles and images and usually run with a handful of both! After a few days, we'll take down the underperforming combos and try a few more! Cheers!
I have a question.
Comparisons are being made "by network".
I can't understand how that can be meaningful.
Wouldn't the more important variables be the domains that provided the traffic and where the content promotion units were placed upon the page?
Hey EGOL! Great question - In this case, we're trying to offer some high-level statistics across multiple content networks, so if you wanted to choose one to start promoting, you'd have some data to utilize. With such a wide array of varying content and the way the algorithms are set up to display certain content (context, recency, language processing, UX, etc), the data comparing domain vs. domain might not be very helpful.
With content distribution, since you can't control the domains that provide traffic to your content or the placement of the promotion unit upon a page, those metrics might not provide as much value to the masses. This would however be very helpful internally to a client, and could help to influence media buying or other forms of PPC advertising! We'll look into this for the next round of data we share!
Thanks for that info. I guess if I was going to spend serious money on this type of content promotion, I should be running a few of them simultaneously and juggle my spend between them based upon performance "by article". From your description, it might be possible that Article A might perform better than Article B on different networks.
@Audrey & Drew - Thanks for mentioning Zemanta. I am the CEO for Zemanta and wanted to clarify what our Content Distribution offering is - you do not quite have it correctly. Zemanta is a DSP for Native Content Ads which means we are a platform to manage paid content distribution campaigns across almost every content distribution network. Our programmatic platform is 100% transparent meaning we show where every click and every impression are coming from - whether from Outbrain, Yahoo, AOL/Gravity, or Adiant/Adblade or the rest. So to your comment about transparency - with Zemanta - you get access to all of the data whether you work with Zemanta's platform or directly with one of our partner networks directly. Zemanta provides a dashboard that allows you to see how each network is performing with each piece of promoted content at whatever bid price you want. Since we are completely transparent, Zemanta does not resell or arbitrage the media costs - the media costs are just passed through to our clients.
Zemanta's business model is to charge a platform/usage fee separate and a part from the media costs (which again are passed directly through to the client). Our platform is tailored to clients and agencies who have large paid content distribution campaigns where their campaigns need to run across multiple networks and large bodies of content. We provide an easier and better way to organize your content, format it for the multitudes of content ad formats, determine bid pricing, campaign optimization and aggregated reporting.
It's similar to search where you can use platforms like Kenshoo or you can use the platform's tools directly. For larger or more complex campaigns, Zemanta can be a better choice for the marketer.
I just want to clarify in one of your examples that your CPA goal was $1200 or less and it ended up being roughly $60?! What was the conversion here, demo, trial, paying customer? Thanks!
Hey Michael! Thanks for reading the case study - in this case, the CPA goal was backed into based on the allocated spend for the campaign and the minimum number of conversions the client needed to consider this a success. The minimum conversion numbers were initially conservative, but really took off after our content found a niche via the distribution algorithms. In this case the conversion metric was free download similar to a white paper or ebook. Let us know if this makes sense!!
For B2B organizations, what type of content are your paying to promote? Blog posts? It's hard to justify spending money just to get views on a blog. And the fact that OutBrain doesn't let you choose targeting, you put a lot of faith in them that somehow they'll find placements on great news sites and publisher sites that somehow match up to my niche B2B market...and then all I get is a view on a blog post?
I'm interested more in promoting whitepapers and ebooks so I can get form submits and nurture them. Are there any case studies around this?
Hey There! Great questions - The B2B example we shared above was not a blog post, but rather a landing page with a collection of proprietary assets to educate users and the target audience on how their products and services can help. We've tested white papers, signups, ebooks, etc in the past and have seen similar results. While you can't pick placements on Outbrain or Taboola (and it might be slightly scary at first!), as long as your titles are targeted towards your niche audience, you should only be driving clicks from those interested parties. Ex: If you're trying to target executives for example, craft your titles and CTA's to speak directly to those positions or users.
I am experimenting with this on Outbrain as we speak. Essentially taking three titles that performed well as written and retargeting them to three specific types of decision makers. As you may expect this practice drives down clicks significantly, forcing up the CPC to achieve significant impressions.
Also as you say crafting the CTA for this niche audience is important. Do you have any data as to which CTAs performed the best in your experiment?
Great read. Is there any evidence that these types of ads turn off visitor segments?
I work for a publishing company that's considering implementing Taboola ads. We produce fairly highbrow content (we're a theater website) and I fear we could lose long standing readers.
@TheaterMania - of course anything you do can turn off visitors. Honestly if you are concerned about the quality of the ads - then I would look harder at Outbrain. Payouts are comparable w/ Taboola and they focus more on brand ads (we buy a lot of inventory from Outbrain for our F500 brand clients via our content ad platform at Zemanta). But perhaps even better would be to go check out AdsNative - they run a native ad platform which intermediates the various networks and allows you to pick and choose between them as well as to see content ads yourself. Also as a buying platform - we are big fans of AdsNative because they support the new OpenRTB standard for Native which means we can buy ads directly via them for advanced targeted content ads. And for those buys we pay top dollar which means more money for you as a publisher. I hope that helps.
Its 2016 and outbrain still hasn't improved on their backend. I tried setting up a few campaign with outbrain, as i was starting to consider native ads campaign as a way to scale my new business. Outbrain crawler just couldn't recognize or fetch any of my content url links for some reason, i deactivated my website firewall setting and did all sort but nah !. I found out their crawler wasn't even visiting those links when i monitored my live traffic. And guess what, i registered with Revcontent after my frustration trying outbrain, revcontent was so intuitive, apart from fetching and rendering my content perfectly they even suggested what content to boost automatically once i entered my URL. Am starting off my campaign with revcontent now and i will see what i can achieve for my business with native ads.
Hi there, I'm very sorry to hear about your experience with our platform. I'd love to help you figure out what might have gone wrong. Can you email me a link to some of the content you're trying to promote? I'm at [email protected]. Also, we're actually just weeks away from launching a complete overhaul of our dashboard. I think you'll agree it will bring us at least up to 2016 :), but I'd love your feedback as we'll be making a lot more improvements shortly after the new release. I hope to hear from you soon, and thanks for considering giving us a second chance.
Sincerely,
Will
Thanks. I was planning to use outbrain and your this post surely helped me.
Regards
Al amin
Do you have any updates on how the paid social campaigns have performed compared to the content networks? Especially in terms of paid social driving new links from referring domains?
This is great, we've tried Taboola but we'd love to test out Outbrain.
interesting info gan , thanks
https://bit.ly/1CGlNMA
Hello,
Some businesses to get more return on your most valuable content, they resort to this. Still, this is not synonymous with success. The results produced by different distribution networks and compare the results to see to what extent can help you optimize ROI on your business you have to consider.
Really interesting and full article.
Thanks for sharing your valuable learnings with all of us. It's well written and highly informative.
I have a question.
You say "Others we've reviewed, but not yet tested:"
What do you mean by reviewed? Have you previously documented the costs, features/functionality, and/or pros and cons of these tools? If yes, is it published and accessible?
Hello Donna! Happy to share & we hope that is was useful. For those other networks, we've reviewed them internally here at Seer, but have not tested them yet. There are a few more we'd like to expand to in 2015 and we hope to release another round of data to help expand on this post! Keep an eye out ;)
Grate stuff!
I also use distribution networks but those who are working with free marketing face limitation, while they distribute their content over a network and they asked for money.
But I have a question suppose, "If I am share content related social media over a huge network which have a category of social media like Frobe, Is it also as beneficial for ROI conversion or only a theme site like B2B community will help?
The 10 steps, you have mentioned are 90% worthy many time we can watch people only click a content just because an interesting title whether it is useful or not.
Hi Nicole! We completely agree that testing titles is important, but this is also why we recommend tracking by titles within GA to determine which are bringing the most valuable visitors! In regards to content, our recommendation would be to start with a small budget and test it out. You likely find that a niche like social media will attract users over time!
I use Outbrain for multiple sites and depending on the industry, it has the potential to have better CPA than the Google Display network (excl. retargeting).
Quality content and user engagement (low bounce rate) are highly recommended, otherwise the high volume and high bounce rate traffic can seriously hurt landing page performance metrics and potentially organic search performance as well.
Thanks for the feedback, Gyorgy! Completely agree that depending upon your goals, it has the potential to provide better CPA. You always want to ensure you're creating high-quality content!!
Thanks Audrey & Drew for the meaningful insights over different content distribution networks. I always say "Content is King" and if it could be distributed through effective platforms it could bring a lot of quality traffic and potential customers to anyone's site. Though there are lots of advertising platforms and ways, but native advertising is getting popular everyday. I see Taboola and Outbrain ads in leading media sites and personally they entice me to click after reading the posts. So it definitely worth to test out for our site EmailMarketingHome.com
Thanks for this highly informative article. I'm experimenting with Outbrain right now, driving traffic to articles for B2B lead capture purposes. I like the ease with which you can test alternative titles and images. One thing I dislike about it is lack of insight and control over the types of websites on which they display my content. I haven't researched the demographics of the sites that are sending the most traffic but I am not seeing positive results so far.
Hey, thanks for reading and reaching out. One thing we'd recommend looking into is the actually landing page you are promoting and the content it contains. Outside of titles and images the networks are looking at this content to help determine where your ads will be served. The page should have detailed content and messaging around your business and products. Also, depends on how long the campaign has been live, we usually see it take a few days to ramp up and find our "sweet spot". I'd reach out to you reps and see if they can provide any insights or optimization ideas.
Great case study guys! This is very valuable information for marketers. I've been lucky enough to do a lot of experimenting with many of the channels you've listed above and understand your desire for maximum transparency and control (thus, not recommending Zemanta). I actually prefer using 3rd parties over working directly with networks. Why? Their negotiated rates with the networks themselves are way better than what I could get, even in a fully optimized campaign. My cost pers working with a 3rd party hover between the $0.06 and $0.07. That's a huge difference from the cost pers in your study. Is the price difference significant enough to forgo some transparency and control? For me, yes, but for others, maybe not.
I am a big fan of Outbrain, though I somehow personally feel that Disqus can be the next big thing for content distribution in 2015. I have liked the way Disqus is evolving from just a comment plugin to a complete package of networking and connecting bloggers together.
Hi Salman - we've also heard great things about Disqus & plan to run a few tests in 2015!
Thank you for the comparative distribution network.
I use Gravity to some websites on the car. It is relatively expensive, but the results are palpable quickly. All you need is good content for an audience already targeted for everything to work. The specific niches before it guarantee.
Thanks technopro! Glad you've seen results with Gravity, as this is something we want to test further in 2015!