Comparison of Outbrain and Reddit

2016 has been a very good year to me, both in my personal and professional life. I have seen growth as a mom, as an author and even as a podcaster. I can actually say that 2016 has been my best year in recent times.

However, there is a saying “if you do what you have always done, you will get what you have always got”. I also love this saying “failing to prepare, is preparing to fail”

In other to achieve growth in 2017, I needed to come up with new strategies. Doing only what I’ve been doing so far, or failing to prepare means growth would be very minimal at best. This is what led me to do a comparison of Outbrain and Reddit.

Twitter and Facebook

Twitter and Facebook have been the top 2 sources of organic traffic to my website. Facebook is actually surprising to me because I barely spend anytime on it. I looked at my Twitter analytics last night and here’s what it showed:

As the amount of engagement my tweets got increased, so did the number of impressions. I think for someone who has been on Twitter less than a year, 120k impressions in 28 days isn’t too bad.

In prepping for 2017, the only ways I could imagine getting growth via Twitter is tweeting more, increasing the amount of followers or taking out Twitter ads. I did a trial of Twitter ads a little while back and it just wasn’t my cup of tea. The same thing with Facebook ads. Thinking back now, I should have written a post with the results and my thoughts. Oh well!

I’d read a lot about Outbrain and Reddit advertising, so I decided to give them both a try.

Outbrain

Outbrain Amplify is said to help you reach new audiences and promote your content on top websites like CNN, People and ESPN. Once you register, you get a self-serve account where you set a daily budget with a minimum of $/£10 (currency is dependent on your location but you can easily switch currencies).

The best thing about Outbrain that I found is that you set how much each click is worth to you (cpc). When you are typing in your cpc, it lists a suggested bid amount of a minimum of £0.34 (I’m in the UK, so charges were in GBP£). However, you can actually choose a cpc of £0.03 as the barest minimum. In other to compete, I chose £0.05.

Starting off, you can only choose the countries you want to appear on. Once your campaign is live and results start coming in, then you can make amends based on those results.

Why I did this trial is that it allows you to use your blog feed rather than specific links. Imagine a situation where you set your feed link up and more or less forget about it and you get traffic to all new posts automatically. Obviously, it is best to monitor results so you can made amendments as and if necessary.

Reddit is a group of online communities and each subreddit is a community. According to Reddit:

Reddit bridges communities and individuals with ideas, the latest digital trends, and breaking news (…okay, and maybe cats). Our mission is to help people discover places where they can be their true selves, and empower our community to flourish.

Reddit is said to be:

Home to 234 million unique users and 8 billion monthly page views

So it makes sense to advertise on Reddit right?

Results of advertising on Outbrain and Reddit

Like Twitter and Facebook advertising, in addition to paying for impressions (cpm) you have no control over the costs per click on Reddit. Whereas on Outbrain, you do not pay for impressions and you set the cost per click.

For this trial, I could only promote a post/link on Reddit. On Outbrain, I used my blog feed, so their system chose the posts to share.

Outbrain made it clear from the get go that you may get charged up to 20% more than your budget and that’s what happened. Whilst Reddit did exceed my budget by A LOT, I was not charged more than my budget.

Maybe the post I chose to promote on Reddit wasn’t the best one for the communities but the click through ratio was considerably less than that of Outbrain. In fact, Outbrain outperformed Reddit in everything (even with Reddit’s increased budget).

Conclusions

Based on the results above, if I were to consider advertising as a means to increasing website traffic, I would choose Outbrain over Reddit (Twitter and Facebook).

The question now is, is £300 monthly worth the additional 6000 new monthly visitors?

If I were to do this all over again, instead of my regular blog feed, I would use my podcast feed. This way guests on my show are getting more brand awareness.

I would like to offer more value to my podcast guests, do you think the investment is worth it? If you were considering appearing on my podcast show as a guest, would you consider contributing towards the costs of promoting your episode?

Additional 6000 unique visitors would take the number of monthly pageviews to well over 10,000. This in turn would increase my website’s domain authority, resulting in higher ranking in search results. Win-win all around me thinks.

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What are your thoughts on my Comparison of Outbrain and Reddit? Have you used either service before? How likely are you to use either?

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