Content Discovery Plaftorms; like Outbrain or Taboola

[bvishal]

Anyone who uses them to grow traffic and anything interesting you have observed about them ?

Any experience of SEO value derived from them ?

[EGOL]

Anyone who uses them to grow traffic and anything interesting you have observed about them ?

I am not promoting content with them.  I am a publisher who tried them on my site as a revenue source.  I found that visitors click them like crazy, resulting in a huge traffic loss from my site for very little money in exchange.  Since the content promotion units are typically located near the bottom of an article, the traffic that they siphon, in my opinion, is very high quality.... like the kind of curios visitors that you want to keep on your site looking at lots of pages.

So, even though my response is a bit of a "complaint" from a publisher, it might be good news for you as a content promoter, because you might find that they pull in some really good visitors if you have the right stories being offered on the right websites.  I think that stories that do well on my site might bomb on other sites and vice versa.

I stopped running them because I felt that a lot of my best visitors were leaving through them.  Today I am promoting my best and most popular content in the same locations.   Another thing that made it easy for me to quit was a lot of the content items and their accompanying images were dumb, smutty, idiot stuff that I really didn't want on my website.  Not saying that yours is in that vein but that is what you might be running beside.

Good luck.  Honestly, I was thinking that I should try promoting my content with them and note the number of pageviews and conversions that they bring to my site.  However, I think that they will do better for viral-type stuff rather than real company shit.

[MoosaHemani]

EGOL must have more experience with that as I am very new on it and just started implementing this for one of my client.

From the content publisher point of view, I believe if your content is kickass and can really engage the audience to stick with your brand then this website can help you get introduced with the wider audience which later can help you go far and wide.

From the conversion point of view, I am not sure if the conversion rate would be good but (if there is any at all) but I personally think this is very much depends upon the kind of content you are promoting. For instance if the content is around your service then there is a chance of conversion but if not then the only thing you will get is more traffic that might or might not stick with your brand.

Hope this helps!

[Alex-Harford]

I haven't tried them myself but a friend who has used Outbrain told me they're good for getting lots of traffic and social shares to a particular article, but they haven't seen much of an increase in conversions or average page views via them.

It all depends on your content, where you place it and what type of traffic you're trying to attract. The cost-per-click is low for Outbrain so it's probably worth trying.

[bvishal]

Thanks everyone for your views. I started this discussion, as I am currently doing a test on OutBrian. We are primarily a publisher, looking to gain more traffic.

Moosa, I believe the conversion cycle anyways varies on the product, however in my experience with quality content to support a conversion, this time to convert drastically reduces.

In my observation commenting tools like Disqus which provides a network of site that not only helps you to reach larger audience but also helps users navigate to most commented articles on your site itself.. This is one of the reason I am trying out these content discovery platforms.

[bvishal]

EGOL, Thanks for your feedback. So now when you are using these discovery platforms.do you see better engagement metrics (page views/visit) among visitors from these channels ?

Also do you promote your video content as well ? If so are the metrics for video any different than for articles/blogs ?

[EGOL]

I am not using them to attract traffic at this time and have not used them for that purpose in the past.

I doubt that visitors from that channel will outperform visitors who arrive at my site after querying a search engine and finding my content or enter my site from links on social sites.

For now, I am focused upon getting more content out that will pull in traffic at zero cost.