Outbrain Reviews & Insights

Score5 out of 10

37 Reviews and Ratings

Community insights

TrustRadius Insights for Outbrain are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.

Pros

User-Friendly Interface: Several users have found Outbrain's user interface to be easy and simple to use, allowing for quick campaign creation. They appreciate the straightforward navigation within the platform, resulting in a smooth overall experience. With minimal learning curve involved, users can easily navigate through the clean and intuitive dashboard.

Cost Savings: Some users have noted that Outbrain's CPCs are comparatively lower when compared to other Social Native platforms. This has led to potential cost savings for these users, making Outbrain an affordable option for their advertising needs.

Quality Traffic Generation: Despite initial concerns about native ads being spammy, many users have been pleasantly surprised by the decent quality of traffic generated through Outbrain's platform. They appreciate that Outbrain's comprehensive distribution network allows them to reach outlets frequented by their target audience but would otherwise be difficult to target. This additional reach helps increase visibility in the marketplace and provides valuable exposure to their content.

Reviews

17 Reviews

Worst customer support ever

Rating: 1 out of 10

March 25, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I run the Berlin Magazine online newspaper. My bad experience is about customer support. Outbrain is creating a code problem on our site. We cannot click on any internal links to our articles or banners. We have been asking customer support for help for two weeks. They reply every three days, ignore emails, ask to send screenshots even when they have already been sent. There is no respect for a customer, after two weeks we are already at the third time that we have to write the same email describing the problem. Even sending a video of the problem they still don't respond. Never had such a bad experience with an online business.

Pros

among the worst customer services ever, answers after days without ever giving an answer
the widget can conflict with the site (I use a Wordpress)
customer service reachable only through a general email

Cons

costumer service

Likelihood to Recommend

We have been trying to contact customer service for two weeks about an issue that the Outbrain widget is causing on our site. You cannot click any internal link to an article, you cannot click on banners either. Our emails are only answered every now and then, always asking to describe the problem or sending screenshots that have already been sent. Most of the emails are completely ignored even though Streak confirms that they have been read. Our experience is bad, there are no other words.

Andrea D'Addio

Founder & CEO at Berlin Italian Communication UG (1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

View profile

Outbrain Is Worth It - If You Have Budget and Patience

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

July 14, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

AdRizer is one of the leading native agencies in South Florida. We utilize Outbrain on a daily basis with our team of 10+ buyers. Averaging well into millions of spend months with consistent results.

The account manager assigned to us answers at all hours of the day, just yesterday Alexa Cupo answered a lengthy email after 8 pm. This kind of white-glove commitment to their clients is the reason we continue to use it.

It does take some time (at first) to build data, working with your account manager will make this process run seamlessly. Personally, Outbrain is preferred over its competitors.

If you are an e-commerce store wanting to push your products onto new ad stacks I would highly suggest giving Outbrain a test.

Pros

Communications
Easy Navigation
CBS Strategies

Cons

I wish there was an activity log (i.e. Changes made to account over time) to help troublesome where the advertiser made a mistake OR needs to make an adjustment
A big caveat is when running CBS (i.e. Target CPA) you cannot adjust your bids since this bidding strategy is automated. After a while you will be limited by the number of publishers you can block. There are over ten thousand publishers but you can only block 1,000.

Likelihood to Recommend

Best suited: Companies with a larger budget who are willing to spend to test before seeing revenue. Building a funnel in Outbrain from scratch for e-commerce can take time.

Less appropriate: Companies with little to no budget that demand instant results.

Tyler Torcivia

Digital Strategist in Marketing at Adrizer (11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

Great for getting eyeballs, but very low ROI if you're looking for direct conversions!

Rating: 4 out of 10

Incentivized

September 22, 2020

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We have used Outbrain on and off again for over 4 years. We started using it for a select few clients before rolling it out as a fully managed service offering within the paid realm. It was great at driving traffic initially but we found that the traffic was very top of funnel or came through as an accidental click and had a very low propensity to actually convert.

Pros

Traffic
Increasing views/sessions
Get more exposure to valuable content

Cons

Targeting outside of specific websites or niches
Value of traffic
Outdated admin

Likelihood to Recommend

Outbrain great for driving visitors and sessions. If impressions is what you're looking for this will work well. If you're looking for bottom-funnel conversions, I would likely recommend you focus on platforms that enable better targeting and more audience limitations. Outbrain worked well to get eyeballs but not actually driving $$ for us and our clients.

Verified User

Manager in Marketing (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

4 years of experience

Outbrain - Low click cost with high revenues

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

September 21, 2020

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Outbrain is a great find for our marketing campaigns when it comes to acquisition and brand awareness. The software is particularly used by the promotions & acquisition team to find new users and a very genuine cost per reach. The platforms bills on every clicks it achieves by promoting the campaign which ensures best use of marketing monies.

Pros

Variable CPC helps keep the cost low - too huge the inventory.
Multiple goal optimization to its best, in this platform.
Selective bidding on the publisher helps scale the campaign.

Cons

Sudden addition of new publisher in the campaign with high clicks hamper the campaign performance sometimes; there should be a check.
Event based conversion implementation is a bit challenge still.
Lack of account teams in the organization for Indian geo is another challenge.

Likelihood to Recommend

Outbrain is a great product to reach to the masses cost effectively with customizable content based on geo, keywords, etc. The platforms charges only on clicks and also optimizes towards the end goals of the campaign as decided before initiating the campaigns. The tools is a good driver of awareness and acquisition.

Verified User

Manager in Marketing (201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

Good price for what it delivers...

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

September 15, 2020

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We find content for our social media bi-weekly posts, and it has many features. We find news from all over the world, filtered by theme, and it helps us out a lot.

Pros

Trustworthy content.
New info.
Ideas for social media posts.
General information.

Cons

Better filtered articles, maybe by region?

Likelihood to Recommend

Of course I would recommend Outbrain, it takes the guessing and the minutes surfing the web to find suitable posts for our social media content, so we can be more efficient about our time for business.

Verified User

Administrator in Corporate (11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

Does What You Want It To Do

Rating: 6 out of 10

Incentivized

September 14, 2020

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Our current use of Outbrain is to reach possible new members for our credit union. We target and advertise to those via Outbrain that are the most likely to engage with us later on. Outbrain is used more as a brand awareness tool to get more of a passing interest in what our credit union offers.

Pros

Easy to use overall, no major hiccups.
Initial set up is fairly simple.
Outbrain's distribution network is great and pretty comprehensive.

Cons

The terms and conditions of the platform can vary and change rapidly, what works one time might not work a second later.
Customer service representatives can sometimes be hard to get a hold of.

Likelihood to Recommend

Outbrain is well suited when you need a fairly straightforward tool that helps get brand awareness out to places on the internet that you might not show up other than through Outbrain. It is a simple(ish) tool that allows increasing brand reach with a beginner to intermediate skill set. Though not the be all end all, it covers a lot of bases well.

Chandler Elmore

Community Development & Engagement Lead in Marketing at Blue Federal Credit Union (201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

View profile

Outbrain helps simplify marketing campaigns and increase reach of your Brand!

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

September 14, 2020

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Outbrain Amplify is used by my ogranization to find new channels for identifying targeted audience with our offerings to promote our content using Outbrain's premium publisher network. Our foremost purpose is to increase our brand awareness amongst our target audience and geographies where we are trying to make our sales more predominant. It has helped us so far in capturing audiences by making our content rich and custom based on their relevance.

Pros

Lead generation, verification and capture.
Contact databases with good amount of details to customize or filter based on important parameters.
Marketing analytics.

Cons

Pipeline management for tracking leads which are potential targets.
NPS scoring.
Lead Database Integration.

Likelihood to Recommend

Ability to give insights into how target audiences are reached - by platform, geography, campaigns, time, etc.
Great distribution network - ability to connect securely with audience on the open web.
Gauge the performance of highly rich data campaigns on lead conversions.
Configuration of content.
Organic dashboards than traditional graphics on a wide range of websites and platforms.

Verified User

Analyst in Information Technology (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

Delivers Average Traffic at a Great Value

Rating: 7 out of 10

Incentivized

November 5, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We utilize Outbrain as primarily an awareness channel for a pretty diverse mix of clients/industries. It's currently only being used by the paid media team. It is a great platform to get a lot of users to your site relatively affordably. While it has some limitations in terms of content, most of the guidelines are straightforward and are not subject to the random disapproval that is becoming more common in the larger social platforms.

Pros

Easy, simple to use interface that can create campaigns pretty quickly.
Comparatively lower CPCs when compared to other Social/Native platforms.
Surprisingly decent quality of traffic. As spammy as some native ads can seem, we've received quality leads when using this platform at scale.

Cons

Ad formats are not very customizable, limited on how your ad appears.
Billing setup can be a pain if you're working worth multiple accounts.
Targeting is pretty vague, not sure who the audience really is, need to monitor traffic using the platform such as GA to ensure it's not too spammy.

Likelihood to Recommend

If your client or organization is running a high volume awareness campaign, Outbrain would be a platform to diversify your mix with. Pretty low maintenance and easy to set up, you can get ads running in a few minutes. If your primary goal is conversions, there are probably better channels you can use where the targeting is a little more transparent and would likely see a higher avg conversion rate.

Vincent Misiewicz

Sr. Search Engine Marketing Analyst in Marketing at Traffic Digital Agency (11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

5 years of experience

View profile

Outbrain: Too brainy for a simple outreach

Rating: 6 out of 10

Incentivized

January 21, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

My company, a news media, is looking for a platform to market our articles. We were previously using another content distribution platform but we're looking for a cheaper alternative due to weakening currency (IDR). Outbrain came as an alternative as it offered cheaper CPC than our previous choice. There were also other alternatives, but Outbrain is significantly more well-known and hence trusted in our view.

Pros

Website network: Outbrain provides high-quality websites in its network so that you can get a quality audience.
Affordable pricing: The CPC offered by Outbrain is relatively cheaper than other alternatives.
Content dashboard: The dashboard allows you to edit the content before publishing it on Outbrain's platform.

Cons

Confusing dashboard: I am used to using a content distribution platform similar to Outbrain, but I was honestly overwhelmed by the complexity of Outbrain's dashboard.
Difficulties in adding new contents: I don't know why but I often encountered an error message while adding a batch of new contents to the dashboard. The message basically said that the content violated Outbrain's terms and policies, despite them being safe (proven when it was considered okay when I input the content links one by one).
Blacklist and whitelist: The features are offered in Outbrain, but it is relatively difficult to set up as you really have to check the websites you want one by one. In my experience, Outbrain does not offer a group of similar websites in the whitelist recommendation. This will help a lot. For instance, a group of news media websites should be recommended to be whitelisted for a news company user.

Likelihood to Recommend

Outbrain is well suited when you have the time to deal with all of its features and complexities. It allows you to customize the content and where your content will be promoted, as well as having a more sophisticated targeting feature. However, for the user like me, who is used to a simpler dashboard, Outbrain can be a tad too overwhelming.

Verified User

Employee in Social Media (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

Outbrain: Endless Possibilities, If You Have the Time

Rating: 4 out of 10

Incentivized

May 17, 2018

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Outbrain to distribute content pieces on our blog onto advertising channels for increased impressions and exposure. We write content which is useful to everyone, and we distribute the content on the Outbrain network to increase readership on our blog and awareness for our brand. Overall, Outbrain provides us with an audience for the content we write relating to our product offerings.

Pros

Distribution Network - We are able to appear on a very wide variety of websites in a more organic way than through traditional display advertising.
Ease of Use - The Outbrain platform was incredibly simple from set-up to optimization. The dashboard is clean, easy-to-use, and very trainable to other team members.
Unique - We found very few comparable services (other than Taboola), and getting into this space of advertising puts you in a completely different view than the typical sidebar or skyscraper ads.

Cons

Customer Service - Speaking to a human is nearly impossible, there is no "chat" function, and no phone number immediately available. Ultimately, I've had to email a generic CS contact and wait several days before heading back.
High Number of Guidelines - The number of guidelines one must meet before using Outbrain is much higher than any other ad platform I've used. Most of them are highly specific and not necessarily items that a website would have out-of-the-box.

Likelihood to Recommend

We haven't found the value to be worth the effort it takes to work through the long list of editorial guidelines necessary to pass through the review stage. While valuable exposure can be gained from Outbrain, it is a lengthy process to prep your website or blog for the Outbrain requisites. However, if you already have a fully prepared website, and are in need of impressions apart from traditional advertising, Outbrain could be beneficial.

Verified User

Employee in Marketing (11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

Loading Reviews List....

Outbrain: Too brainy for a simple outreach

Rating: 6 out of 10

Incentivized

January 21, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Pros

Website network: Outbrain provides high-quality websites in its network so that you can get a quality audience.
Affordable pricing: The CPC offered by Outbrain is relatively cheaper than other alternatives.
Content dashboard: The dashboard allows you to edit the content before publishing it on Outbrain's platform.

Cons

Confusing dashboard: I am used to using a content distribution platform similar to Outbrain, but I was honestly overwhelmed by the complexity of Outbrain's dashboard.
Difficulties in adding new contents: I don't know why but I often encountered an error message while adding a batch of new contents to the dashboard. The message basically said that the content violated Outbrain's terms and policies, despite them being safe (proven when it was considered okay when I input the content links one by one).
Blacklist and whitelist: The features are offered in Outbrain, but it is relatively difficult to set up as you really have to check the websites you want one by one. In my experience, Outbrain does not offer a group of similar websites in the whitelist recommendation. This will help a lot. For instance, a group of news media websites should be recommended to be whitelisted for a news company user.

Likelihood to Recommend

Verified User

Employee in Social Media (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience