Promotion tool

Outbrain native ads

Outbrain is a native advertising network. The ad is a headline and a thumbnail in a content recommendation placement on a publisher site. A reader is already in an article. The unit asks them to open another story. If they click, they should land on a page that keeps the promise the headline just made. That is the same shape of ad you see on other native networks. It is not the same network, and it is not the same campaign.

Maxlead does not own Outbrain. Outbrain is a separate company, with its own account, its own publishers, its own review of headlines and images, and its own way of charging for the click. Maxlead is a CPA performance network that has operated since 2015. Maxlead issues the offer and the tracking link, records the click when the country is allowed, and pays approved earnings every week. Outbrain does not approve your CPA conversion. Maxlead does not sell the Outbrain placement. Keep those two ledgers apart or you will scale the wrong one.

Same kind of ad, different inventory

People group native platforms together because the creative looks alike: a short title, a picture, a click. The sites that show the ad are not a shared pool you can treat as one audience. A headline that earned approved conversions on Taboola was shown to Taboola’s publishers, under Taboola’s auction, after Taboola accepted the image and the line. Outbrain decides its own inventory and its own approval. The readers are not a duplicate set. A winner on one account is a hypothesis on the other, nothing more.

That is why you do not copy a live Taboola campaign into Outbrain and keep the same sub IDs. If s1 still says taboola, the Maxlead report mixes two sources into one row. You would pause or scale a blended number and learn nothing about either platform. A new network gets a new sub ID. Use s1 for outbrain, or put outbrain in s2 if you reserve s1 for a broader label, but do not reuse the exact campaign id you already used for the other source. The performance report can split on those values. Give it a split that means something.

Moderation can diverge on the same words. A thumbnail Outbrain rejects is not a verdict on the offer, and a thumbnail Taboola allowed is not a promise Outbrain will allow it. Rewrite or replace the asset. Do not route around a rejection by pointing the ad at a different URL that hides the offer. The destination stays the Maxlead tracking link for an offer that allows this source and this country.

What has to be true on the offer

Before you create the Outbrain campaign, open the offer on Maxlead. Confirm that native traffic is allowed. Content recommendation, native, or the source name the offer actually uses are the lines that count. If native is forbidden, do not buy the click. A completed form does not repair a forbidden source. The conversion can be rejected, and rejected conversions are not paid.

Confirm the country. A click is stored on the offer only when the visitor’s country is on that offer. Outbrain geo that reaches a country the offer does not accept is spend with no click row on that campaign. Do not target extra countries because the other native account happened to have them, and do not target a country where a different offer, on a different network, once converted. The list on this offer is the list.

Read the action, the payout written on the offer, and the cap for today. Your payout is that offer’s amount on an approved conversion. It is not a figure from a homepage sample, and it is not a cost figure from the ad account. This guide does not invent click prices, minimum spends, or click-through rates. You will see what Outbrain charges inside your own account. You will see what Maxlead approved inside the report. Compare those two facts for the sub ID you created. Do not compare them to a borrowed benchmark.

Public offers can be taken once your account is approved. Offers that require approval stay closed until an admin accepts the request. Do not paste a link from a colleague, and do not paste the preview URL. The preview is how you read the advertiser page. Traffic goes only to the tracking link that carries your publisher id.

How the campaign is built

Build one campaign for one offer and one country. Add the headline, the thumbnail, and the URL Outbrain asks for. The URL is the Maxlead tracking link. On the offer page, add the sub IDs, then copy. A clear set is s1 set to outbrain, s2 set to the campaign name, s3 set to the headline, and s4 set to the thumbnail. If you are also running Taboola, none of those values should equal the Taboola campaign’s values. Similar English is not a problem. Identical tokens are a problem, because the report will add the clicks together.

If you test two headlines, they need two s3 values. If you test two thumbnails under one headline, they need two s4 values, or you will not know which picture to pause. Keep the offer and the country fixed while those labels change. The day you also swap the offer, you have started a second test and you should say so in a new s2.

Name the campaign in Outbrain with the same words you put in s2. Next week you will not remember which thumbnail was “image 2.” You will remember us-insurance-desk if that string is in both places. Leave passwords, wallet addresses, and anyone else’s personal data out of the parameters. Sub IDs are stored with the click and can appear on the report.

After the click, Maxlead creates a click id and sends the visitor to the advertiser, provided the country is allowed. That click id is what a conversion and a postback refer to. You can save a global postback, or a postback for this offer only. The call goes out when a conversion is approved or rejected. Pending conversions do not send a postback and do not count as earnings. Credit the status approved. Do not credit rejected. The postback is a notice to your tracker. The payment is the weekly payout of approved earnings only.

A worked example, starting from a Taboola result

A publisher already has a Taboola campaign on a finance offer. The offer allows native and accepts the United States. On Maxlead, s1 equals taboola and s3 equals headline-rates. That sub ID has approved conversions. EPC on that row is approved earnings divided by those clicks. The publisher wants to try Outbrain. The mistake would be to duplicate the campaign, leave s1 as taboola, and treat the old EPC as a forecast.

They do not do that. They open the same offer, confirm it is still approved, still open, and still inside the cap they can read on the offer. They copy a new tracking link. s1 is outbrain. s2 is us-finance-ob-test. s3 is headline-rates. s4 is thumb-desk. The headline text can be the same words that won on Taboola. The sub ID is not the same. The campaign is not a continuation. It is a new test on a new source.

They launch only that campaign. They do not add a second country. They do not add a sweepstakes offer beside the finance offer. Outbrain shows its own clicks and its own spend. Maxlead shows clicks on s1 equals outbrain. For a while, headline-rates on Outbrain has clicks and no approved conversions, even though the identical line still converts on Taboola. That is a possible outcome, not a tracking bug. The audiences are different. They do not “fix” it by merging the rows in a spreadsheet and declaring the headline profitable overall. They read the Outbrain sub ID on its own.

They give the test enough clicks to be readable, without inventing a magic click count in advance. If approved conversions appear on s3 headline-rates for the outbrain value of s1, they compute EPC from those approved earnings and those clicks. CVR is approved conversions divided by clicks on that same slice. If a second Outbrain headline, s3 headline-clock, gathers clicks and no approved conversions, they pause headline-clock in Outbrain. They do not pause the Taboola campaign because of an Outbrain loser, and they do not scale Outbrain because Taboola’s EPC looked strong last week.

Suppose Outbrain rejects the thumbnail. They replace the image, set a new s4, and leave the old s4 unused. They do not switch the URL to the advertiser preview to “see if the image was the problem.” The preview never carries the publisher id. Any click that skips the tracking link is invisible to the payout.

EPC, CVR, and the pause

The dashboard on Maxlead is clicks, conversions, CVR, earnings, and EPC. Earnings are the approved payout. EPC is earnings per click. CVR is approved conversions divided by clicks. Use the performance report when you need the sub IDs. Use the conversion report when you need the conversions that count. Pending rows are not in those reports as payable results. A pixel inside Outbrain, or a goal you defined as “clicked the ad,” is not this EPC.

Pause the Outbrain item that spends and does not produce approved conversions once the split is visible against another item in the same campaign. Keep an item that has not had a fair read. Do not raise the campaign because the click chart steepened. The offer can hit a daily cap, or it can be paused, while the ad account is still happy to deliver. When the cap is full or the offer is paused, stop Outbrain. Extra clicks will not become extra approved conversions.

If you run a tracker, pass its click id through the Maxlead link and take the status back on the postback, along with the payout token, the offer, and sub1 through sub8. Those sub tokens are the values you placed in s1 through s8. A custom parameter can ride along when it follows the rules in the publisher guide. None of that replaces the weekly payout. You are paid the approved earnings, on the weekly cycle, to the payment details saved on the account.

Caps and countries, read again

International traffic is normal on Maxlead. It is still per offer. The country you select in Outbrain must be a country named on the offer, or a smaller slice of that list. Language matters in practice even when it is not a separate payout field. A page in one language, shown to people who do not read it, produces clicks and a weak CVR. Narrow the campaign. Do not invent a rate and keep going.

The cap for today is a limit on payable volume, not a suggestion. A Taboola campaign and an Outbrain campaign pointed at the same offer share that cap. They do not each get a private copy of it because they are different ad accounts. Watch the offer while both run. If you are near the cap, pause the source that is not producing approved conversions first, which you can see only if the sub IDs differ.

Mistakes that come from treating Outbrain as a clone

Cloning the Taboola URL with the old sub IDs is the mistake this page exists to stop. So is assuming the old EPC will repeat. So is turning on three countries because the toggle was easy. So is pasting the preview URL. So is calling a native placement allowed when the offer text forbids it. So is one s3 for every headline. So is reading Outbrain’s conversion column as the amount Maxlead will pay on Friday’s weekly run. So is scaling both networks on the same afternoon you launched the second one. So is ignoring a rejected postback and paying yourself inside a tracker anyway. So is mixing pop, push, or email traffic into an Outbrain native link and hoping the source label still counts as native. The placement you bought is the source you must be allowed to use.

If the offer text is ambiguous about Outbrain specifically versus native in general, ask the account manager before you spend. A short answer on the account is cheaper than a week of rejected leads. The manager cannot change a forbidden source into an allowed one. They can tell you what the offer already says.

Open the desk, then the ad account

Outbrain is a place to buy a headline-and-thumbnail click. It is not a CPA network, and it is not part of Maxlead. Start on the offer: native allowed, country listed, cap still open, tracking link copied with a publisher id and with sub IDs that do not collide with any other source. Run one campaign. Judge it on approved conversions. Pause the creative that does not earn. Leave the other network’s winner on its own row. When you need the account that issues the link, go to the Maxlead homepage and sign in from there.