Outbrain is our #2 source of commercial traffic, after Adwords. We find that content amplification can be an extremely cost effective way of generating registrations inexpensively and has a number of side benefits. For one, it it’s not search engine marketing, so it doesn’t compete with Adwords, Adsense or SEO.

But content amplification can be tricky. I suspect that bots and clickfraud problems that plague online ad platforms are a problem with content amplifiers as well. It’s easy to waste the budget if you are new to the game (let’s say I have a friend who did just that). So here are a few pointers. They may be highly subjective, but they reflect my experience and hopefully they’ll help you as well.

1. Turn mobile traffic off

It just doesn’t convert. I suspect, just like with Adsense ads, most of mobile clicks are accidental.

2. Use block list extensively

As a rule, your #1 source of traffic for any given Outbrain campaign will be crap. You can block up to 10 publishers yourself. But there’s really no limit to how many publishers you can place on your black list, if you contact Outbrain support, they’ll block unwanted publishers within a day. Blocking and unblocking publishers in conjunction with Google Analytics stats (bounce rate, time spent on page) will give you a decent idea of which publishers are the worst.

3. Start with minimal bids

When I create a new Outbrain campaign, the suggested bid price is around 80 cents. I find that with good copy and headline I can buy a lot of traffic paying 3–6 cents on average. Granted, Bitrix24 sells equally well in the golden billion countries (North America and Western Europe) and the developing world (India, Vietnam, etc), so your bids might be higher if you target specific countries, but again start low, then adjust.

4. Direct promotion always never works

Finish reading the post in my Medium blog