Welcome to Outbrain Amplify! We’re happy to help you get started on Outbrain and want to make it easy for you to begin your first standard campaign. Below, we have broken down each step with a few quick tips for you to follow along while creating your campaign.
By the end of this article, you’ll know how to:
- Create Your Outbrain Account
- Retrieve and Place Your Outbrain Pixel
- Create Your First Campaign
- Submit your Content
Let’s get started!
First, head to the registration page to select your country, enter your email address, and create a password. Be sure to choose the country that matches your billing address, as you will not be able to submit your credit card information unless it matches the country on this page. Outbrain is continuously growing, so if you receive a message that says we’re unavailable in your country, rest assured — we’ll be there soon!
For a step-by-step tutorial on how to create your first standard campaign, check out the below video. Please note, there are labeled chapters for each section (e.g., Campaign Objective, Budget & Budget Types) to help guide you if there are specific topics you’d like to review.
Retrieve and Place your Outbrain Pixel
Please install the Outbrain tracking pixel right after signing up. You will see “Pixels” and “Audiences” tabs in your Outbrain dashboard. The Outbrain pixel can be retrieved from either tab, and serves two purposes:
1. Tracking Conversions
2. Collecting Custom Audience segments for targeting
Select your Campaign Objective
The first step in creating a new campaign is to select your Campaign Objective. This will help our system to guide you toward the best strategies and features for your campaign. There are four objectives you can select from:
- Awareness: Increase brand awareness by maximizing views and clicks of your content.
- Traffic: Drive traffic to your website by maximizing clicks from audiences likely to engage with your content.
- App Installs: Increase app installs by maximizing clicks of your content.
- Conversions: Drive conversions by optimizing conversions from your target audience.
A Campaign Objective should be selected for all campaigns, to ensure that you have the correct strategy enabled for your campaign goal, and will prompt you to optimize towards the most relevant KPIs within the campaign set up screen.
Choose your Creative Format
- Single: Select this option to serve individual Standard Outbrain Smartads within your campaign.
- Carousel: Select this option to run a campaign using our Carousel Smartad.
- For step-by-step instructions on how to set up a Carousel campaign, check out this Help Center Article.
- App Install: The App Install Smartad format is only available upon the selection of “App Install” as your campaign objective. For more information about the App Install Smartad, visit this Help Center Article.
Define Your Budget
Outbrain runs on a Cost-Per-Click, or CPC, pricing model, which means you will be charged for the number of clicks your campaign receives based on the CPC you set.
The budget can be set to whatever amount you’d like (The only minimum is $20 per day). We recommend starting with a daily budget of $50 – $100 in order to gather enough data to analyze and optimize your campaign.
For CPC, we recommend starting with a CPC between $0.65 and $0.85. This range will help you achieve your campaign goals right from the start. Once the campaign is spending well, you’ll be able to lower the value by a few cents and maximize your budget.
If you’re tracking conversions, utilize Outbrain’s Conversion Bid Strategy to auto-optimize toward your conversion objectives.
Set Your Duration
To schedule a campaign; you can choose to run the campaign on a continuous basis or between specific dates. We recommend running the campaign for at least a week to review the results. Setting the campaign to run continuously means it will remain active until you choose to disable it.
If you are aiming to receive conversions, we recommend setting the campaign for at least a month or more in order to gain traction.
Tailor Your Targeting
Our algorithms will do most of the heavy lifting, but you can tailor the campaign settings to further target your desired audience. You can see all our targeting options here.
We recommend selecting one device per campaign to see which platform will drive the best engagement. Then, enter a tracking code to monitor your traffic in your Analytics platform. This is not mandatory, but it’s a great way to organize your data and see what content is driving the best engagement.
Our Reach Estimator will provide you with a 30-day potential reach and allow you to make smarter targeting decisions.
Submit your Content
Next, add in your content. For content best practices, check out this Help Center article!
We recommend adding 3-4 title and image variations per URL, helping the system locate the top performer and drive attention to a specific page.
Click here for more information and tips on adding content.
If you receive an error when inputting the content, please make sure our crawlers are not blocked and then re-submit.
Click “Launch Campaign” when finished.
Your content will now undergo a 1 business day review period, making sure that it abides by our Content Guidelines.
Have any questions or need some tips? Reach out to our DIY Customer Success team!
We look forward to seeing your content on the network!
