One of our top publisher clients was in need of a quick traffic blitz to support an ad sales deal.  They came to us with an aggressive traffic goal and asked for recommendations on how to achieve it in a short period of time.

Outbrain did some quick brainstorming on the most cost efficient approach to drive the traffic and devised a plan.  The campaign over delivered on the client’s goal while driving a highly qualified audience.

Below is a quick case study of the campaign.

Challenge: Drive 100,000 visitors to their site within a 12 hour period on a Sunday in August.

Results:

- Outbrain over delivered on traffic by 2%

- Over 11,000,000 impressions served in 12 hours

- 1% Click Through Rate

- Average 3 PVs/Session

Which got me thinking….. I’m one of those moms.  From a demographic standpoint, I fit the mold perfectly…. 30 something (sorry, not gonna reveal that one) with an 18 month old baby who works full time and lives in a major metropolitan city.  But really, I don’t consider myself a stereotypical mom at all.  I don’t respond to the typical banner advertising I see online. Especially those creepy ones that follow me around the web just because I happened to check out a specific product. I don’t visit your normal “mom” sites, I don’t really care about coupons (I just don’t have time) and I’d rather hang out with my friends at the park than spend time online (I do that all day at work).

So, how does an advertiser find me? They put themselves in places where I am actually in the mindset of engaging in something that I’m interested in – which may not have anything to do with my baby (even though I’m always thinking about her and prepared to hit “buy” at any moment). That site could be a site like CNN (which has a mostly male demographic) or a video game website (again, mostly for men). Most media plans wouldn’t target these sites, which means they won’t find me and trust me, I spend just as much money on diapers and other junk as the rest of the moms out there!

Just imagine if they switch their planning process away from targeting a specific demo and focused more on having me discover their product when I’m ready for it. They’d find a lot more of me out there.

It seems that Moms just want useful and relevant information.  Hear, Hear!

You can read the article here.

Article written by Outbrain COO, David Sasson.

I was looking for a quick lunch near our Outbrain office in Union Square this afternoon, where two different marketing approaches were on stark display. People were streaming down Park Ave. and a disheveled, tired old man was standing in front of a pizzeria shoving menus in everyone’s face and shouting “free soda with two slices, free soda with two slices!”. We all parted like a river around a rock  to avoid him. He did sneak a menu into the hands of a few of us, but when I looked into the pizzeria, it was dark and bare with only a person or two silently munching away in isolation. They didn’t seem to be enjoying the free soda.

Less than a block further on, there was another interruption in the pedestrian flow. This time, however, it was because a line was snaking out the door and overflowing into the street from a small falafel shop called Maoz.

Of course I immediately thought: this is classic top-down broadcast advertising versus engagement marketing (really, who wouldn’t have thought that??). On the one hand, you’ve got a store pushing their message in the face of people who clearly aren’t interested, trying to make up for a lack of buyers by discounting their product and simply being louder. And it wasn’t working, people were tripping over each other to avoid him, dodging as quickly as you or I move our eyes away from banner ads to the content we actually care about on the web. I myself even had to hand the menu back the poor schmo and tell him ‘No Thanks’, which is what I do by clicking the X button on interstitial ads all day long. Getting in people’s faces doesn’t engage them with your brand – it’s a turn off. One look in the pizzeria would tell you that.

Meanwhile, down the street, what was Maoz doing right? Well for one, they have a differentiated product (falafel) which clearly helps sell itself more easily than a commodity (pizza in NYC). But beyond that, the decor is inviting, cheerful greens and glass paneling that make it bright and cheery. It’s easy to tell it’s a serve-yourself place where you simply take what you want to eat and don’t get stuff you *don’t* want packaged in (free soda anyone? please??).  In sum, it was a brand that had made itself a desirable destination…..people were coming to it, so it didn’t have to come to them.

There is a lesson in this for online marketers: you need to provide people with a destination so they have reason to come to you. In the digital space, top down broadcast advertising is exceedingly difficult to pull off successfully. It’s usually perceived as annoying, even more so as the medium moves faster and faster toward personalization (my facebook stream, my selected apps, my start page). If someone does not invite you onto their screen, your message just doesn’t have juice.

Good agencies and brand marketers are figuring this out and developing new ways to create destinations that can attract and build interested audiences. Facebook fan pages and twitter updates with really useful information are one avenue, giving bloggers something to talk about in a new way that touches on your brand is another. Or creating really compelling editorial content that is adjacent to your brand (not *about* your brand for heaven’s sake…..that will flop) with brand marketing/sponsorship in the periphery. All of these tactics are useful ways to move marketing from a push model to a pull model, and all succeed or fail based on whether they can provide something of interest to people, whose attention span is fleeting.

So to all of us in the space, let’s keep working with good differentiated products while creating engaging environments that will have people coming to us. No one wants to have to hire that crusty old man with the menus.

You can find more of David’s musings on his blog.

Since the conference was focused around e-tablets and other digital reading devices, there were a lot of questions about using our widget on mobile devices (note: yes you can, just email us).  I tried to count how many times the question of “Is the iPad a Kindle killer?” came up, but I lost count by mid-day.

Thanks to all our friends at The Big Money for a great event. We were glad to participate. Special thanks for the yummy food. Ending the day with bite sized cupcakes from Baked by Melissa is always a plus.

See you next year.

Lisa

If you have any questions, we’re happy to help. Just email us at info[at]outbrain[dot]com.

Enjoy.

Here’s a rundown of some of the new things you’ll see:

Dashboard

The new dashboard gives you a “last 30 days” snapshot of the widget performance. It contains a few mini-reports:

• Traffic – Shows you how many people clicked an Outbrain recommendation on your site. This report is  broken into Page Views (where the widget is installed), Click-Through rate (the percentage of people who clicked on a recommendation) and Total Traffic.

• Revenue – Available to our premium publishers with whom we have a revenue-share agreement (see if you qualify). This report is broken into Page Views with Paid Links (where the widget is installed and paid links are turned on), RPM (revenue per 1,000 pageviews with paid links turned on) and total revenue to you.
• Ratings – Only available if you have ratings turned on. This report shows the last 5 posts/articles you have published and the average rating for each.
• Traffic Sources – Available if you have a network of sites you are sharing links with. This report is showing which sites the traffic came from.
• Top 10 – Lists your top performing articles or blog posts. It is showing the most clicked-to articles and if you are a premium publisher, it will also show you which articles are making you the most money.

Detailed reports

The new detailed reports will give you a robust insight into the widget performance.

• Detailed Traffic Report -Shows a daily breakdown of traffic and click-through rates . You are also able to aggregate the data by month or by site (in case you have the widget installed on multiple sites).
• Detailed Revenue Report – Available for our premium publishers. It is showing a daily breakdown of RPM and total revenue. You can also aggregate the data by month or by site.
• Detailed Ratings Report – this report is very similar to the reports you are already familiar with. We have added support for date selection and the “thumbs up” rater.

We hope you’ll enjoy our latest enhancements and as always – your feedback is welcome. Feel free to leave a comment or to email me directly – amit at outbrain dot com.

We welcome you to the new Outbrain website! If you are reading this on your RSS reader, we encourage you to drop by and let us know what you think. We hope this change will make our site easier and more fun to use.

Many many thanks to the Outbrain Engineering and QA teams for working so hard on implementing all of this! Kudos to the talented Mighty team for creating this new design: Jason Santa Maria, Dan Cederholm and Erin Kissane – It’s been a pleasure working with these guys.

We hope you like what you see. Please leave a comment, letting us know what you think. 

Then it's off to Blogworld in Las Vegas for our third year.  Come say hello to Kate and I as we will have the latest in how we are helping some of the largest publishers and smallest bloggers all delight their readers with relevant content.  This year we add revenue to the mix and in classic outbrain fashion, it's not what you expect.  You won't see ugly, irrelevant banners or images of teeth or midsections within our widget.  What you will see is a reader friendly ad unit that is actually useful to the reader.  Think about how google ads are relevant when searching and apply this same concept to content.  Come check us at booth #413.