Outbrain“Good Advertising” which is meant to achieve a great aim “Reader Trust First, Revenue Second” is all basically about the following:
(1) Bloggers grab their widget that allows readers to rate the bloggers’ articles.
(2) Advertisers then pay for placing their “Sponsored” links in that widgets ($10 per month per each link);
(3) If the blogger opted in showing those “Sponsored” links in his widget and if his blog is relevant, that “Sponsored” link will appear within a good content and people will feel like clicking it (if the link has been manually pre-approved by the OutBrain team).
The widget looks as follows:
All that sounds quite good and naturally I thought it was a good idea to give it a go.
I decided to compare how it works with two articles which are similar in topic but different in style:
- Announcing MyBlogGuest: Community of Guest Bloggers (press-release style announcement of my guest bloggers’ forum);
- How Guest Blogging Made Me 5-Figures in 2009 (a viral post on the same topic written by Glen Allsopp).
The dashboard looks quite promising: for every date you can see how the links performed in terms of:
- Number of impressions;
- Number of clicks;
- Number of “Share clicks” (how many times the page got shared on Twitter or Facebook);
- “Word-of-mouth clicks” (number of clicks Twitter and Facebook shares generated);
- “Traffic Lift” (Percentage of additional, non-paid traffic generated by link sharing”)
Each article I tested ran for about a month. Both behaved very similarly: they had lots of impressions daily (really “lots of“), just a few clicks, and zero shares and “word-of-mouth” clicks (though the viral post did get a few more clicks):
#1
#2
I don’t mean to say I was very picky when selecting the posts to advertise or tried to choose something really outstanding. I chose the articles on the spot just for the sake of testing; but the fact that the stats looked exactly the same for both is a bit alarming, don’t you think so?
Now, OutBrain does have content tips to make the most of advertising (which I seem to have followed by the way):
- News articles, blog posts, press releases, product/service reviews;
- Something that focuses on readable, enjoyable content (versus straight sales page or contact form);
Have you tried OutBrain ads? If you have or if you plan to, don’t forget to come back and share your experience!
It looks like a god way to promote articles and the best part is that it is economical.
Hey Ann – thanks for the review of Outloud! I’m the founder and CEO of Outbrain.
Ann – if you, or any of your readers, have any further questions about Outbrain and how our services can work for you, please ask them in the comments below or head to our support forum at http://www.getsatisfaction.com/outbrain
Hi Ann-
This is David, COO of Outbrain – thanks so much for trialing our OutLoud program. We appreciate the feedback, it’s always very useful as we develop our product line.
A couple of points about how we distribute articles and how they perform you may find useful. Articles submitted to OutLoud are targeted in areas contextually similar to them. So articles about widely read topics may get higher overall impessions than articles focused on more niche areas of interest. If multiple articles are substantively about the same thing, they will often share impression volume and you’ll see similar levels of distribution.
In terms of clicks and CTR, we see very large differences due to the title of the article. For instance, PR oriented titles that simply “announce” usually attract a lower number of clickers than directed titles that really “engage” people. Looking at the two articles you submitted, it seems one big difference is that one article has ~8X the click through rate of the other — this is very much in line with what we see elsewhere. We see swings of 0.01% to 2% depending on the article, so a 200x difference . Which titles do well? It’s really not rocket science… when we step back as people (not data munchers) and read titles in the absence of any more information about the article, it’s pretty easy to predict which one people are going to think is interesting and click. Our world is not an SEO world – titles don’t need to be heavy with the right keywords, they need to be interesting and catchy.
Hope this helps explains things a bit, and thanks again for giving us a try!
Thank you for sharing information!
Its sounds likes good !
Hi, Pardon me for the question – I’m a newbee in these things, but from my small experience with Google ads, I’ve been told that 1% CTR is good, more than that is great, and less than 0.5% is pretty bad.
From the numbers above, the CTR of the best article is 0.13% – which is (for my understanding) not so good.
Do you think it’s worth the $10/month?
Why not invest this money in Google ads? (if you can create a $10 campaign…). Thanks, Gabi.