Using Taboola, Outbrain, RevContent, Plista, or any ‘content advertising platform’ will lead to constant loss of users.
This is a very common question that every Digital Media Officer has been asked, or asked him/herself. The direct answer is: content advertising services will negatively affect your KPIs.
The term Content Advertising Services refers to the widgets you include, usually at the end of an article, displaying thumbnails and titles of content from other sources. These services act as a middle-man between these sources and yourself. You get paid based on the traffic you are referring to these sources.
Based on the above explanation of what these services main goal is, it is clear that their aim is to get people off your website so that their customers [the other sources] are happy. In other words, their interest contradicts with any engagement strategy you implement.
To elaborate on the above, the key performance indicators that Content Advertising Services will affect negatively on your website are:
- PageViews decrease
- Time spent on site decreases
- Bounce Rate increases
- Pages/Session decrease
- Search Engine Driven visits decrease since you lose the inter-linking advantage of other content on your site for content that’s not yours.
However, the most important loss you will face is not related to KPIs, it is related to the sentiment of users and advertisers.
Content Advertising Services are considered by many users as click-baits, and even spam content. Associating your brand with such services might lead to a negative user experience.
As for advertisers, most premium advertisers no longer engage with publishers that use such services in order to avoid co-existing with such ‘cheap’ click-bait and ‘spam’ advertising. Even if they do engage, they try to be differentiated completely by using, for example, video advertising.
Some of these Content Advertising Services do offer recommendation widgets that only show articles from your own site. But, as you might expect, the technology used to generate these recommendations lags when it comes to Click-Through Rates (CTR), simply because these companies do not earn anything from this service and concentrate all their resources on improving the outbound service instead.
Hope the above helps. If you have any question regarding this content please feel free to email us at: blog@klangoo.com, and please include the title or link of this blog to better understand your comment/question.
