Better Together: 7 Hacks for Using Outbrain with Other Performance-Based Marketing Channels

Like peanut butter and jelly, wine and cheese, or yin and yang, some things are better together. At Outbrain, our winning performance-based native advertising platform is even more powerful when used in conjunction with other tools and strategies.

Want to know how to increase brand awareness, improve your retargeting strategy or lower your CPA in a few simple steps? Read on to see how Outbrain combined with other performance-based marketing channels can help create a more holistic and effective strategy:

1. Measure Brand Awareness: Outbrain + Paid Search Brand Campaigns
2. Refine Your Remarketing: Outbrain + RLSA
3. Better, Brighter Campaigns: Outbrain + Facebook Insights
4. Looks Like Success: Outbrain Lookalikes + LinkedIn Traffic
5. Instant A/B Testing Results: Outbrain + Hotjar
6. Control Your Brand Story: Outbrain + PR Crisis Management
7. Second Chances: Outbrain + Retargeting

Measure Brand Awareness: Outbrain + Paid Search Brand Campaigns

Outbrain is all about content discovery and native advertising—but when used in other ways, it can bring loads of additional benefits, including brand awareness.

For example, once your readers have engaged with your article promoted by Outbrain, how many then search for your brand keyword and reach your Bing or Google Ads campaign as a result?

You can measure this data point, and then use it to leverage your Outbrain campaigns to improve brand awareness via your PPC campaigns.

How to do it

You can easily set this up as a “conversion” point in URL contains {campaign name}, just like we did below in the conversion section.

Add this to your reports, and you’ll get some powerful incremental data about your AdWords campaigns.

Refine Your Remarketing: Outbrain + RLSA

You may want to target people searching for long-tail keywords that are a good fit for your business—but these are often expensive, and you’re not inclined to bid on them.

However, there’s a more cost-effective way, and it involves the remarketing lists for search ads (RLSA) feature available in Google AdWords and BingAds.
Use UTMs in your Google Analytics/AdWords and BingAds accounts to create unique remarketing lists of visitors to your website who arrived via your Outbrain Amplify campaigns only.

By combining Amplify traffic with your RLSA campaigns, you can better tailor your long-tail keyword search ads to target a more qualified audience. When used well, RLSAs can result in a more efficient use of ad spend, better conversion rates and, ultimately, better ROI.

How to do it (two ways)

• Optimize bids for your existing keywords and campaigns for visitors on your remarketing lists. For example, you can increase your bid by 25% for those who visited your website via an Outbrain Amplify campaign in the past 30 days. Or you could show a different ad to site visitors who have read a specific piece of content on your Outbrain Amplify campaigns.
• Bid on keywords that you don’t normally bid on specifically for people who have recently clicked on your Outbrain Amplify campaigns. This can help increase your conversion rate. For example, you could bid on broader keywords just for people who previously visited your site from an Outbrain campaign.

Better, Brighter Campaigns: Outbrain + Facebook Insights

If you are using the Facebook Insights tool to define your target audience—whether it’s your page fans or a custom audience—then you’re getting help from the behavioral lists under the Demographics tab.

At Outbrain, we use a similar targeting feature to generate tons of helpful data, which means you can leverage the same data-based strategies you use for your Facebook campaigns to get better results from your Outbrain campaigns too.

How to do it

If you want to use this premium feature, reach out to us at support@outbrain.com and we’ll be happy to help.

Looks Like Success: Outbrain Lookalikes + LinkedIn Traffic

Although it’s one of the most expensive CPC platforms, many performance marketers love Linkedin because of its premium targeting options, And most B2B advertisers are using LinkedIn as part of their paid acquisition sources.

Recently, Outbrain launched its new Lookalike Audience feature, and it’s a great fit with LinkedIn.

You can use Outbrain Lookalikes to move the premium traffic you just drove to your assets beyond the actual click.

How to do it

Create an Outbrain custom audience based on your LinkedIn traffic (for example, utm_source=linkedin), and then create a lookalike audience list based on these users.

(Note: You will need to have at least 100 users in the “seed” per country per device list to be able to create a lookalike audience.)

Instant A/B Testing Results: Outbrain + Hotjar

As performance marketers, we’re constantly creating and testing a variety of web assets, from articles to landing pages, ebooks to online calculators.

One of our biggest challenges is knowing whether the content we just created is good to go or whether it needs more work. We’re not sure how users will behave or if the UX serves our needs.

No performance marketer wants to wait weeks to analyze their traffic. Luckily, Outbrain has a way around this problem.

How to do it

We recommend using Outbrain’s network, which offers premium traffic but fair CPC, to test your content and get clear results within a day. You can easily open a new campaign, set minimum budgets with affordable CPCs ($0.1–$0.4), and start generating traffic fast. Then you can use Hotjar to record the traffic and gain interesting insights (and conclusions) after just a day or two.

Control Your Brand Story: Outbrain + PR Crisis Management

We’ve all experienced a bad review, technical glitch or other PR crisis that you have to deal with fast. Take control of your brand story right away with the help of Outbrain’s native advertising widget.

How to do it

As soon as the crisis hits, start promoting positive earned media on Outbrain’s premium publisher network, and drive positive stories about your business to your audience. You can do it instantly based on your own budget preferences.

Soon the tide will begin to turn and you’ll have your image under control again.

Second Chances: Outbrain + Retargeting

There are a few ways to retarget customers who have seen your assets but not yet converted, using Outbrain in conjunction with other platforms.

How to do it (three ways)

• Outbrain + Earned media: Positive reviews from other trusted sources are a great way to present your brand. We recommend creating brand awareness via a good third-party review. Then you can retarget engaged users with your best assets and take them further down the funnel, all within the Outbrain network.
• Outbrain + Facebook/Google: Outbrain’s native solution also works the opposite way. First, promote your brand story via Outbrain’s native advertising widgets so your business will be featured on top publisher sites (with fair CPC). Then, by using our third-party pixel solution, you can retarget these users across Facebook, Google or any other preferred channel.

• Outbrain + YouTube: We sometimes promote our own interactive content via the Outbrain Amplify platform. Next, we aggregate the users into a list and retarget them via YouTube with an engaging video about our product.
• Outbrain + AI:  Segment the traffic to your site from Outbrain using Fixel’s AI-based segmentation (This provides pinpoint targeting that focuses your spend on engaged users) and then retarget this segment on Outbrain’s premium network.
   

If you’re interested in learning about deeper, more sophisticated remarketing tactics, you can find them here.

Snapshot: How Outbrain + Other Performance-Marketing Channels Drive Better Results

• Outbrain + Paid Search Brand Campaigns: Measure and boost brand awareness
• Outbrain + RLSA: Increase value from long-tail keyword bids
• Outbrain + Facebook Insights: Use Facebook Insights to improve Outbrain campaigns
• Outbrain Lookalikes + LinkedIn Traffic: Get more conversions from premium Linkedin traffic
• Outbrain + Hotjar: Get valuable data fast with A/B testing of Outbrain campaigns
• Outbrain + PR Crisis Management: Leverage Outbrain campaigns to better manage your PR
• Outbrain + Retargeting: Increase conversions by retargeting with Outbrain across a range of platforms