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Outbrain Tutorial for Native Noobs - Part 2 (1)

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Creating Ads

Entire books can be written on how to create ads effectively, and it's not the main focus of this tutorial.

So I'll keep this section brief. I WILL say though that it helps to read up on copywriting (e.g. "Cashvertising" which is a must-read for online marketers) and banner creation. We have entire forum sections devoted to those topics, that you can learn from:

https://stmforum.com/forum/forumdisp...amp-Psychology

https://stmforum.com/forum/forumdisp...rs-amp-Landers


Outbrain Ad Requirements

There's a hard limit of 50 ads allowed per campaign. Outbrain recommends testing 10-15 ads at a time.

Each ad consists of:

1)An Ad Title - up to 150 characters allowed. Outbrain recommends to keep ad titles under 80 characters, or they'd risk getting cut off when displayed.

2)An Ad Image - up to 2.5 mb in file size, with recommended dimensions being 1200 x 800 px.

Another important thing to know here is that ad CTR is crucial to a campaign's success. In order to get traffic on Outbrain, you're entered into bidding auctions, and the 2 factors that will determine the likelihood of winning an auction are Ad CTR and CPC. This means that if you have an ad that has a high CTR, you can still win a lot of bids even with a lower CPC. Just something to keep in mind when creating your ads.


Getting Inspiration for Ads

From Adplexity results that were very relevant to what I was promoting, I wrote down a number of ad titles, and got an idea on what types of images were used.

Examples of Ad Titles:

-Born Before 1961? Claim These [X] Seniors Rebates Now
-Seniors Over [X] Should Claim These Benefits
-[X] Discounts Seniors Get Only If They Know

Above we've covered Outbrain's recommendations on title length. I would further recommend to keep the title even shorter than 80 characters if possible - based on my experience with other display ads, shorter titles often work better, probably because visitors can more easily tell at a glance what the ad is about.

You're encouraged to do your own testing, but I'd strongly suggest to include at least a couple of ad titles that are under 50 characters.

Also worth mentioning is Outbrain's "Dynamic Title" feature, which allows you to automatically display in the ad title, the visitor's country/region/city, as well as the day of week (or the day of week + 1 day, or +2/3/4/5/6 days):



Based on my very limited testing, inserting the visitor's location seems to fetch better CTR than not.

Examples of Images:

-Seniors holding up checks or bills
-Wads of cash
-A totally irrelevant image of a McDonald's sign with a single arch instead of the usual double arch:



Whenever I run any type of display ads, I make it a habit to test "viral" type images like this one, i.e. images that REALLY capture people's attention and entice them to click.

Just one warning about viral images though: Although they can get you high CTR, it may not translate into a good conversion rate, i.e. lots of clickers and very few leads/customers. Many traffic networks - Outbrain included - will assign more traffic to high-CTR ads. So if you DO decide to test viral images, keep your eye on that ROI, or the ad can spend your budget and not convert very well. (Ads with this particular image did exactly that to my campaign - until I paused them.)

Also: In addition to copying some of the ad titles from relevant Adplexity ads, I also came up with several that were inspired by ads that weren't relevant - at all.

In Adplexity, I did a broad search without specifying a keyword at all - to browse recent ads that received the most traffic:

https://native.adplexity.com/search/...me_desc&ln=:en

For example, one of the ads said "You Won't Believe the Story Behind This Shot!" I could use the same idea to come up with something relevant like "Seniors Won't Believe How Much They Can Save With These [X] Discounts!" (This isn't the best example but you get the idea.)

So: Look through ads that have received a lot of traffic (i.e. tried and tested), borrow structure and words, and come up with something relevant to what you're promoting.


Where to Get Images

So where can you get images for ads (and landers too)?

The big disclaimer here is that I'm not a lawyer, so please do your due diligence when it comes to what images/videos you have rights to use. Although, I will do my best to suggest the safest places to find them.

(I know many affiliates would just rip ad images from spy tools - I don't know how risky that would be or not. Personally I like to play on the safe side by using images I have rights to. Plus, Outbrain also requires that we own usage rights to ad images.)

Here are some ways to get these images:

1)Anything you can get from the affiliate network, offer owner, or owner of the service/product you're promoting.

2)Google images. Go to google, perform a search, click on the "Images" tab > click on "Tools" > click on "Usage Rights". Then select either "Labeled for Reuse" if you're not planning on modifying the image, or "Labeled for reuse with modification" if you're planning on modifying it. (Note: Even if you're planning on using the image as-is, I would highly recommend to at least remove the metadata, and perhaps resize it slightly by zooming in.)



3)Free stock images. Please see this post for details:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...lus-secret-tip

There's also Needpix.com, which I've found recently and haven't had a chance to incorporate into the custom search engine described in the link above.

4)Paid stock image sites. Here are some that have decent-sized collections and reasonable prices:

-Envato Elements - This is the best deal I've found so far - has a good selection of stock videos, graphics, photos, audio clips, and more.

-123rf.com - I like to get their "pay-as-you-go" On Demand Credits packages, and whatever I can't find in envato I'd search for here.


Number of Ads to Test

As was mentioned above, Outbrain recommends testing 10-15 ads at a time.

Eventually I whittled my list of ad titles down to around 7, and the number of images down to around 7 as well. Then for each ad title I selected 2-3 images I felt would be most suitable. I uploaded close to 20 ads, but had to pause out three-quarters of them after a short time, as I realized it would have taken up quite a bit of budget to test so many ads.

Outbrain's algo needs to send enough traffic to each ad, until it can "figure out" which ones have potential to be good performers, and start sending more traffic to those while sending less/little/no traffic to the poor performers. So the more ads you have, the more budget would be required.

On the other hand, the more ads you test, the higher the likelihood of finding one or more good performers.

So you need to find a balance.

Another approach you can take, is do what I did: Load up lots of ads, run them for a bit, then manually pause out ads that had the lowest CTR. The risk though would be two-fold:

a)Ads may or may not have received enough impressions to show true performance yet, when you pause them prematurely, and

b)You risk cutting out ads that have lower CTR but higher CR (conversion rate) that can result in higher ROI.

I'll make suggestions on how to cut ads later in this tutorial. For now, I would suggest sticking to Outbrain's recommended 10-15 ads to start. Pick 5 ad titles or fewer, 10 images or fewer, then pick 2-3 images to match each title, to produce the total of 10-15 ad variations.



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Setting Up the Outbrain Campaign

In this part of the tutorial, I'll go over how to create a campaign on Outbrain, while explaining some of the targeting options and best practices.

Here I want to give a BIG shoutout to Bryan Hernandez, Outbrain's Director of Customer Success - East Coast. He has been most patient in providing guidance from the very start. We've done several calls and he answered numerous questions I've sent him on skype. This tutorial wouldn't be what it is without his help - thanks Bryan!

Also: I want to point out that the options available on my account may not be the same as what you see in yours - I have a feeling that some advertisers' account may have access to different targeting options than mine. Moreover, depending on how much time has elapsed between when I published this post and the time you're reading this, the interface may have gotten updated. When in doubt about anything, please check with Outbrain support.

Now let's get that campaign set up! First step would be to log into Outbrain, click on "Campaigns" in the left menu, then click "Add Campaign".





About Outbrain's Ad Placements

Let's get some terminology straight before I refer to them all over the place. Outbrain's placements are defined by "Publishers" and "Sections".

A Publisher is a website, app, etc. For example, theHill.com.

A Section is a part of a publisher, where a publisher can have multiple sections. For example, theHill.com has many sections, including "Opinion", "Senate", "House", "Administration", "Campaign", and others.





Name Your Campaign

This one is self-explanatory. Give your campaign a meaningful name. Considering including some/all of: Offer vertical, date, audience targeting, country, device targeting, campaign objective, etc. Don't overthink - you can change this at any time.





Campaign Objective



The best choice for most of us would probably be either "Traffic" or "Conversions".

Traffic: Outbrain will try to try to get as many clicks as possible.

Conversions: Outbrain will try to get as many conversions as possible.

(To read about the other objectives see this article.)

For my first campaign, I chose "Conversions" as the campaign objective. I would recommend for you to choose the same for your first campaign as well.



Creative Format



To keep things simple, just start with "Single" - unless you've had success with carousel ads on Outbrain or FB or anywhere else. (For more info please see this article.)



Budget

Bid Strategy: You should see 2 options:



Semi Automatic - Outbrain will try to send more traffic from sections that are converting the best for your campaign. Mostly it will be using the default bid you specify (in the "Cost per Click (CPC)" field below), but sometimes it will be bidding higher than that in order to get more traffic from the best-converting sections.

How much higher? By an amount up to the percentage you set in the "Max CPC limit:" field.

Fully Automatic Whereas "Semi Automatic" will only allow the algo to adjust the bid for sections, "Fully Automatic" will ALSO allow the algo to adjust bids for your ads (or "content" as Outbrain calls them). Also, whereas "Semi Automatic" will mostly use the default bid you specify, "Fully Automatic" will allow the algo to change that default bid as it sees fit.

Also, with "Fully Automatic", Outbrain will automatically daypart for you as well.

Bryan advised to use "Semi-Automatic" for my first campaign. Feel free to do the same if you're not wanting too many moving parts at the start.

Conversions: This is an option that would appear if you had chosen "Conversion" as the campaign strategy (but not for "Traffic"). Select the conversion you've set up earlier in the tutorial (when you clicked on "Conversions" in the left menu).



Cost per Click (CPC): If you have the luck of having an Outbrain rep, be sure to ask them for up-to-date values for competitive bids. If you don't, here are some guidelines from Bryan:

For desktop traffic: $0.75-0.85 normally (pre-covid), but since prices have come down recently, $0.55-0.75 should be good.

For mobile traffic: $0.45-0.55 normally (pre-covid), but since prices have come down recently, $0.35-0.40 should do.

Feel free to play with bids, but be aware that by bidding low, you won't get much (or ANY) traffic from the more competitive placements, which are probably the ones that are converting the best (hence everyone bidding higher to get more traffic from them, driving up the prices).

Moreoever, be aware that the first 48 hours of a new campaign is what Outbrain calls the "exploration phase", during which it's super important to "start high and optimize down". "Starting high" means having a daily budget of no lower than $50, a competitive CPC bid, and good ad CTRs.



Max CPC limit: This option is only available for "Semi Automatic" Conversion campaigns. Bryan recommended to just leave it at the default 100%. I was told that Outbrain's algo is fairly conservative, such that the CPC wouldn't change drastically from the CPC we specify anyways.



Run Experiment: This option may or may not be available in your account.

This option will allow you the option of running a split-test (A/B test) between 1)optimizing towards conversions via semi or fully automatic, whichever you specified, and 2)just standard traffic without automatically optimizing towards conversions.

For my first campaign, at the suggestion of Bryan, I checkmarked this option and set the percentage to 70% (i.e. 70% conversion-optimized, 30% standard traffic).



This split-test did not run to completion (i.e. statistical significance) because the budget ran out before it could. But based on preliminary data, the amount of revenue made by Outbrain's Semi-Automatic optimization was 2.5x (250%) the amount of revenue made from unoptimized standard traffic.

(For more information about this A/B option, see this article.)

Budget Type:



Daily Budget: Outbrain recommends to set this to at least $250 USD per day for best results. However, I would actually recommend setting it to $50/day for the first day, and then $100/day for the next couple/few days while you're cutting underperforming ads and placements - here are the advantages:

-The initial low budget would give you a chance to make sure that all your tracking is correct, everything works as intended, etc.

-This would give you a chance to cut ads and placements manually. Some of Outbrain's stats can be delayed by up to 2-4 hours, so running a bit of traffic daily will give the stats a chance to "catch up" so you can cut more efficiently).

Once you've cut down to a couple of winning ads, and most of the major placements have either been cut or had their bids adjusted, you can always increase the budget further - to $250 or more. For the US for example, $250/day is not much at all. It has the potential to spend over $1k/day depending on bid and placements etc. If you spend enough to keep traffic running throughout the day, you'll be able to gather data on which days of week and hours of day convert the best, so you'd be able to implement dayparting adequately later on.

Which brings me to the next point: If you're running on a daily budget that is so low that it will be depleted before the day is over, make sure you start running traffic at a good time of day that will get you traffic during the best-converting hours. Either set this up in the "Schedule" section of Outbrain's campaign targeting options (covered below), or do the same via rules in theOptimizer (covered later in the tutorial).

If you don't yet have data on the offers you're running, and so have absolutely no idea what the best-converting hours would be, try to start traffic either in the morning around 8am, or in the evening around 5pm. According to personal experience (from running other types of traffic), I've found mornings and evenings to be the "safest" hours to target.

(Remembering the importance of the "exploration phase", please be reminded to set the daily budget no lower than $50. Outbrain recommends that even if you want to set it to $50 the first day, it should be increased to at least $100+ the next day for the best results.)

Note that the actual spend can be up to 20% higher than what you specify here. In fact it often was in my case because I was running on such a low daily budget.

Pacing: This should be set to "Accelerated" by default. There is currently no option to stagger/throttle traffic. So Outbrain will send you as much traffic as is available as quickly as possible until the daily budget is reached (+ up to 20%) and then stop.



Schedule



Start Date: Either choose "Run continuously" starting from a certain date, or "Set dates" to set a date range. The difference is you can set an end date with the latter option. I chose the first option and paused/ended the campaign as I saw fit.

A note here regarding pausing a campaign: Outbrain's optimization algo doesn't handle campaign pausing very well, so try to refrain from pausing a campaign. Doing so can hurt campaign performance. If you somehow need to pause a campaign, and when you restart it, you no longer see the same level of performance, consider duplicating the campaign to get a fresh start.

Start Time: You can set the campaign to start at the same time each day, or choose the hours of day and days of week you'd like for traffic to run. Remember our discussion on setting an appropriate start time above. If you're using theOptimizer, you can choose to do the same from there instead of here.



Target



Location: You can specify one or more countries, regions, DMAs (if targeting the US), and/or postal codes.

Advanced Audience Targeting: You can target audiences by interests and/or attributes, and create custom and lookalike audiences, similar to what you can do when advertising on FB. I didn't use this in my campaign, but you can get more information from this article.



Placement



Platform/OS/Browser: Self-explanatory. I chose to target mobile simply because mobile traffic was cheaper (please see suggested bids in the bidding section above). With such a small test budget, I wanted to collect as much data as possible.

If you're not working with such a restricted budget, a better way to make an informed decision would be to review Adplexity search results that are relevant to what you're promoting, to look at what devices are being targeted:



For best results, only take into consideration campaigns that have received the most traffic over at least a few days.

Also: Avoid targeting mobile and desktop in the same campaign. Otherwise you risk overbidding for mobile traffic and underbidding for desktop traffic - remember how different the suggested bid ranges were?

Bonus: Bryan gave me a tip that tablets usually have lower conversion rates. So if you're running a vertical/lander/offers for the first time, it would be wise to exclude this in the beginning.

Outbrain Extended Network: Also referred to as the OEN. Fox News and a handful of other quality publishers are included in this network. However, Bryan advised to keep this option deselected for my campaign to keep the number of publishers manageable (since I was operating on a low budget). I would suggest the same for you in the beginning. You can always turn OEN on when you're ready to scale your campaign.



Adblock: Bryan suggested for me to exclude adblock users. Considering traffic costs would remain the same, why not?





Track

Suffix: Take your Voluum campaign url, copy the entire second part after the first "?", and paste it into this field.

For example, if the Voluum campaign url looks like this:

Then put the following in the "suffix" field:

3rd Party Pixels: You can add FB and/or Google pixels here. But if you've implemented FB pixels on your lander(s) as I've described in a previous section, then there would be no need to implement the FB pixel here. For more information please read this article.

Lastly - click on "Next: Content".



If you see the following pop up, and you've added Outbrain's postback url to Voluum as I've described, then you can safely ignore it:



Just click "Got it" and move on.



Add Content



For the "URL/RSS" toggle, leave "URL" highlighted (the default).

In the field that says "Enter your content's URL", enter the first part of your voluum campaign url.

For example, if the voluum campaign url looks like this:

Then put the following in this field:

Leave "Load image and title from URL" unchecked.

Note: If you see the message "Something went wrong with your content submission. Please try adding the URL again. Read our FAQ for additional information.", it may be because your landing page site doesn't have the required privacy and contact pages and the required personal contact information. If you've doubled checked and all the required information is there, please contact Outbrain support for help.

For "Site Name", put your landing page domain name as you want it to be displayed in your ad. As you type it in you'll see how it looks in the preview to the right.

Next, put your ad titles in the "Title" section and upload your ad images in the "Image" section. Note that if you put multiple ad titles and images, Outbrain will automatically create all possible combinations of the titles and images for you, which you'll see appear in the column to the left.

You can also click "+ New" to enter a new batch of title(s) and image(s), without deleting ads you've previously created.

And remember Outbrain's Dynamic Title feature? If you want to insert a dynamic token, just starting by typing "${" into a title field to bring up a dropdown and select the token you want.

Reminder: Outbrain recommends testing 10-15 ads at a time. Also note that ads can't be edited as soon as they're submitted - you can pause them however.

When you're happy with the ads you've created in the left column, click "Submit" and we're done!



Uploading a Bulk Blacklist

If you are fortunate enough to have gotten a blacklist of placements from your Outbrain rep, this is how you would upload it: Click on "Campaigns" in left menu > choose either the "By Publisher" tab or the "By Section" tab (depending on whether the blacklist is for Publishers or Sections) > Import > Excludes > Upload.



If the list is bigger than the maximum number of items you're allowed to upload, ask your rep to increase this limit for you.

If you didn't receive such a list, no worries. I'll provide some tips in the optimization section later that will help you to cut publishers.



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Next, wait patiently for your Outbrain campaign to be approved, which would typically take 1 business day.

In the meantime, you can set up theOptimizer - which will be covered in part 3:

Outbrain Tutorial for Native Noobs - Part 3



Amy

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