🔓How to unlock the power of paid content marketing using Outbrain & Taboola – with Sandra Wu, Paid Content Marketing Lead at Blinkist 📱

Our guest today is Sandra Wu, paid content marketer at Blinkist. In today’s interview, Sandra dispels many of the misconceptions about using these marketing channels. Starting from suggesting an entirely different approach to these ads and understanding the place it occupies in the funnel, to selecting the right metrics to measure success and critically evaluating if paid content marketing is indeed the right user flow for an app, she covers all bases.

In this conversation, she highlights the many differences between Facebook and Google advertising and paid content marketing with relatable examples and sharp insights.

KEY HIGHLIGHTS

🧮How paid content marketing differs from Facebook and Google ads.

🔎The user flow on platforms like Outbrain and Taboola.

🛬Landing pages and the paid content marketing user flow.

🧩Components of a paid content ad.

✒️Why the headline is the first touchpoint for a user.

🤔Why two seemingly similar headlines can have very different performance.

🎯How copy helps qualify the right users.

🤞Why it’s important to mirror the style of the top publisher that you expect to work on.

🎰Why clickbait traffic can become very expensive.

💯How sensationalism or buzzwords can be impactful.

🛣️When to use a direct-to-app store user flow, and when to use a landing page.

🗺️How to structure a landing page.

⚖️How to strike the right balance between being sales-y and valuable.

⚠️The biggest mistakes made by marketers when it comes to paid content marketing.

KEY QUOTES

Why choose a paid content flow

The reason why you would choose a paid content flow with them is because it offers you an opportunity to capture people while they’re in a reading mode. So it’s actually a perfect match with the content flow.

Images and headlines don’t have to match

A lot of people ask me whether you got to make sure that the image matches the headline; it’s not necessary at all. Because the people looking at these ads don’t perceive it as one item. It just comes right afterwards. The image attracts and leaves almost no impression whatsoever on the person and when they look at the headline, and that’s where that would be like their first impression of the product.

And that sets the expectation about what’s going to happen after that, and how likely they will convert after looking at this headline.

Qualify audiences by setting expectations

This is the concept of targeting through creatives. You’re not just relying on lookalike audiences to find the most qualified traffic; you’re relying on setting better expectations with people. And you do that through copy.

The extra step in the funnel is an opportunity

It wouldn’t work if you have an article headline, or a landing page headline, that sounds like a plain ad. It just doesn’t do well, because people don’t actually benefit from having that extra step in the funnel. And in the end, it only hurts you. So I would say come up with a really good value proposition that you can write a lot of content around.

Why you should match publisher styles

When it comes to actually narrowing down a good headline, I would say, try to mirror the style of the top publisher that you think you’ll be advertising on. You can get this information on Outbrain or Taboola’s websites—you can see what kind of publishers there are. Or you can even get in touch with them and say, “Hey, I’m interested in this market specifically. Can you tell me what your portfolio looks like in that market?” and do some research from there.

I’ll give you an example. If I’m advertising in the US on Outbrain, I know that CNN is going to be my top spender. So I will keep the language a little bit more journalistic. But if I’m advertising in the UK, and I’m working with Taboola, I know that most of their inventory is tabloid news. So the language can be a little bit more casual. Even with Business Insider, I can keep the language a little bit more casual.

Sensationalism works

For example, someone writes a headline that says ‘Moms like this app’. I wouldn’t write it like that. Because I’ve been in this industry for so long, I will never settle for such a plain headline. I would probably rewrite that ‘Moms are praising this ingenious app’, or something like that. It seems very buzzword-y but this way of dressing it up is actually pretty good at raising the CTR.

When to choose the content flow

I see a lot of apps going for the App Store flow, because it is much easier to get right. You don’t have to hire writers to actually write articles, or designers to design a landing page for you. And also, I do see quite a lot of gaming apps going for this option. It really just comes down to the unique selling point of your app.

Like I mentioned before, you’ve got to come up with a piece of content that would benefit from having that extra step. If an app is plain and simple, and it’s free—which is the case with a lot of gaming apps—or if it competes on pricing, then you just want to send them to the App Store as fast as you can. You don’t want to have an extra step in the funnel, where you could lose people. So the App Store flow makes so much more sense, if that’s your app.

But if your app is, say, high-end. Maybe it requires a bit of explanation like, for example, Blinkist. It was the first of its kind, really, and it is so hard to explain what we do in one sentence or in 300 characters. Having this extra article or landing page made a lot of sense. It really got the buy-in from the users. So in that case, you want to go with the content flow.

Paid content flow is still advertizing

They’ll say, “Oh, we don’t know why our campaigns are so bad.” And I would reply, “Okay, show me what kind of landing page you’ve used.” And then I read it. I just say, “Where do you talk about your app? I’ve been reading this for like two minutes; I don’t see anything about your app. No wonder it didn’t work.” Just because there’s content attached to it doesn’t mean that you need to suddenly switch gears and only talk about things that would be suitable for The Economist. You still have to sell your product. And don’t wait too late.

FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW

Shamanth: I’m very excited to welcome Sandra Wu to the Mobile User Acquisition Show. Sandra, welcome to the show.

Sandra: Thank you, Shamanth. How are you?

Shamanth: I’m great. And I’m thrilled to have you on the show today, as we have been talking about this for a while.

Sandra: Very happy to be here.

Shamanth: Thrilled to have you because you’re certainly among the leading experts on paid content in the world today. You’ve managed substantial scale and significant results with paid content, which is what we’re going to dive into today.

So at a very high level, how is paid content different from Facebook or Google ads? And how does that change a marketer’s strategy?

Sandra: A lot of people tend to think of paid content as different from Facebook and Google, but in fact, it’s a unique flow.

It’s a flow that redirects to a piece of content, before the App Store, so you can also use this on Facebook and Google. It just means these ads—instead of taking you directly to the App Store like a lot of mobile app ads—take you to a landing page or an article first, where you will get a little bit more information about the app before going to the App Store or Google Play.

The reason why people think it’s different from Facebook and Google is that this flow is traditionally more associated with Outbrain and Taboola.

For those of you who are not familiar with these channels, they’re basically native advertising channels who offer inventory on new websites. They control the ad space underneath most articles you will read online. To give you an example, if you visit the Guardian, at the end of the article, there will be a section that says ‘You may like’ or ‘From around the world’; that is owned mostly by Outbrain and Taboola.

And that’s why it’s more popular there.

Nowadays, I think an app install campaign is just as popular on Outbrain and Taboola. So basically it started off with Outbrain and Taboola, but this flow is being used on quite a few channels now.

Your other question was about how this changes a marketer’s strategy. I would say that right now, especially in the last few weeks, there’s been a lot of concern about the iOS14 release. And a lot of apps are rushing to find a workflow, so they don’t have to rely so much on the App Store. And I think this is where app marketers decided to make a content flow work.

Before now, they would have had an advantage because they don’t rely completely on the App Store flow. They have something to fall back on. I think a lot of other marketers are starting to learn this, and they do want to make a content flow work for them. So this is how it fits into the strategy nowadays.

Shamanth: So it sounds like this is so significant because people are already reading, right? If they’re on a news website, already reading, you’re giving them something more to read. So there’s a fairly seamless transition, then there’s a call to action, and therefore they convert. And it sounds like that’s why it can be so powerful as a user flow.

Sandra: Yeah, exactly. But it could also be the case that, if someone is browsing their feed on Facebook, and they’re interested in discovering content, this also fits in very nicely.

Shamanth: Right. And because it isn’t specific to certain platforms, it could be leveraged within Facebook ads just as well?

Sandra: Yeah exactly.

Shamanth: With a paid content ad, there are different components. There’s a headline, there’s an image, and there’s a landing page as a part of the flow. My understanding is that the headline on a paid content ad is significantly more important than, let’s just say, the ad copy on Facebook, where the ad copy is almost peripheral to the image or the video, whereas with a paid content ad, the headline is so critical. Can you speak to why this is the case?

Sandra: Yeah, sure. Well, Facebook is just a completely different animal; you couldn’t really apply the same learnings from Facebook to paid content. In my experience, you can get away with having the same ad copy for a while, as long as you refresh the video or the carousel ad or whatever you have as the creative. And I think that these ads are a lot flashier. The copy is really only a part of the experience.

Whereas with, like you said, with paid content ads—where it’s just an image and a headline—it’s so simple, and people actually behave with it differently.

There was a study that was done by Taboola, where they tried to analyze how people engage with these ads. And this ad is actually a funnel in itself. So the image serves to attract people’s attention. And when people have their eyes on the ad, then they look at the headline. So the headline is really the first touchpoint.

In fact,

a lot of people ask me whether you got to make sure that the image matches the headline; it’s not necessary at all. Because the people looking at these ads don’t perceive it as one item. It just comes right afterwards. The image attracts and leaves almost no impression whatsoever on the person and when they look at the headline, and that’s where that would be like their first impression of the product.

And that sets the expectation about what’s going to happen after that, and how likely they will convert after looking at this headline.

Maybe I can give you an example. Let’s assume that you have a weight loss app. And there’s a paid content ad of a woman running, it attracts your attention to you, and you decide to look at the ad. It could have one of two headlines: the first one being, ‘This app teaches you how to lose weight in 30 days’, and the second one is, ‘5 tips on how to lose weight in 30 days’.

Which one do you think would have a better ROI?

Shamanth: They both look very similar, visually. What is the answer?

Sandra: The difference between the two is: ‘This app teaches you how to lose weight in 30 days’ is a lot more niche for sure. There’s probably not as many people interested in clicking this, than ‘5 tips on how to lose weight in 30 days’, because anyone could click the latter, as anyone will want to know these five tips. But not everyone will be interested in an app.

If you were to go with ‘5 tips on how to lose weight in 30 days’, it sets the expectation that the person clicking is there to figure out what these 5 tips are; they’re not there to check out your app. So even if your app is tip number 2, for example, they’re clicking with the intention of reading up on quick tips that would help them. They’re not going to be interested in converting later on. So, even if the CTR is 3x on a headline like this, the conversion rate wouldn’t be that great because people have completely different intentions to what you want.

Whereas with the headline ‘This app teaches you how to lose weight in 30 days’, the people clicking are probably interested in this kind of app, or they’re interested enough that they want to know. The thought is that this person is trying to sell something to me, but I’m intrigued enough because I want to lose weight in 30 days.

So they are a lot more qualified and, because sometimes you’re paying by CPC on Outbrain and Taboola, you don’t want everyone clicking on your ad. You just want qualified traffic.

Shamanth: Right. I really like how you are qualifying the right users via the copy itself. It’s not something that a lot of marketers really think through, but it can be so critical.

Sandra: I completely agree with you. I think marketers nowadays rely so much on fancy targeting options or analyzing assets, tweaking things here and there to make sure that they have the most qualified audience. Whereas I think they would probably get a bigger impact by evaluating whether or not their message attracted the right people, rather than playing around with different assets.

Shamanth: Yeah. And that when it comes to picking a headline, you gave a great example, about what would work and what wouldn’t. What would you say are some of the key elements or considerations when selecting a headline?

Sandra: Because the funnel is longer and there’s an article or landing page behind it, it’s not really as simple as how to pick the right headline.

The most important thing is that you’ve got to make sure you have a good article or landing page to begin with. The way to do that is to choose an interesting idea that you can write 800 words about, which would do a good job of selling your app.

It wouldn’t work if you have an article headline, or a landing page headline, that sounds like a plain ad. It just doesn’t do well, because people don’t actually benefit from having that extra step in the funnel. And in the end, it only hurts you. So I would say come up with a really good value proposition that you can write a lot of content around.

When it comes to actually narrowing down a good headline, I would say, try to mirror the style of the top publisher that you think you’ll be advertising on. You can get this information on Outbrain or Taboola’s websites—you can see what kind of publishers there are. Or you can even get in touch with them and say, “Hey, I’m interested in this market specifically. Can you tell me what your portfolio looks like in that market?” and do some research from there.

I’ll give you an example. If I’m advertising in the US on Outbrain, I know that CNN is going to be my top spender. So I will keep the language a little bit more journalistic. But if I’m advertising in the UK, and I’m working with Taboola, I know that most of their inventory is tabloid news. So the language can be a little bit more casual. Even with Business Insider, I can keep the language a little bit more casual.

The first, most important thing is to make sure you have a good idea. There’s no point in tweaking your headline, adding buzzwords or clickbait expressions if you don’t have a good article. But once you do have that, then just do your research and figure out where your ads are going to appear and try to simulate that kind of language.

Shamanth: Yeah, so in some ways you’re being native to where the ads are shown. You want to make sure the ad language mirrors its surroundings.

Sandra: Yeah, exactly.

Shamanth: Yeah. And, as you know, with headlines, you could potentially get very clickbait-y. You could say something like, ‘You’ll never believe this happened’. That’s probably an exaggeration, but you could certainly write a headline with the sole benefit of eliciting clicks. So, in your experience, how well do clickbait headlines work?

Sandra: It’s so funny because a lot of people think this is a huge part of paid content marketing.

If you were to look at some of these ads, and their headlines, for example, ‘You wouldn’t believe how Daniel Radcliffe looks like now’, you expect people to think, “Wow, I’m so curious what’s on the next page!” and you want them to click on it. But I don’t do that anymore.

So I tried this kind of strategy at the very beginning of my career. When I started doing this, I was thinking, “Oh wow, like I’ve been hired to write clickbait articles.” I like it. I was so curious about how this would work. But it only went on for maybe a week, where I was trying these kinds of titles. I realized that the CTR was really good, but the quality of the traffic was really poor. And as I mentioned before, you pay per click on Outbrain and Taboola, so there’s really no need for you to clickbait because your ad actually ends up costing you quite a lot. You just want qualified traffic.

For example, if you’re targeting middle-aged people with your app, you don’t want 18- or 16-year olds, who spend ages online clicking on your headline, just because you added ‘You won’t believe what reason number two is!’

The one thing I do is add sensationalism to my headlines. It’s not clickbaiting. Some people confuse the two. I use a lot of buzzwords. And I find that this is a pretty good way of increasing CTR, while still having qualified audiences.

For example, someone writes a headline that says ‘Moms like this app’. I wouldn’t write it like that. Because I’ve been in this industry for so long, I will never settle for such a plain headline. I would probably rewrite that ‘Moms are praising this ingenious app’, or something like that. It seems very buzzword-y but this way of dressing it up is actually pretty good at raising the CTR.

And it wouldn’t cost you later on.

Shamanth: Yeah. So you’re still increasing your CTR, but you’re not getting random unqualified traffic, which you would if you went very clickbait-y. And, like you said earlier, you don’t want people who are just looking for 5 tips. You want people who can actually buy a subscription in the app, who are actually the right fit. And I really like how you characterized the distinction here, between clickbait-y headlines and the ones that are relatively more plain.

In terms of the user flow itself, you could have a paid content headline on an ad that takes users directly to the App Store, or you could take them to the landing page—which is what you’ve been describing for most part. When do you recommend that an app look at a direct-to-App Store flow? And when do you recommend that they look at a flow to a landing page?

Sandra: Recently,

I see a lot of apps going for the App Store flow, because it is much easier to get right. You don’t have to hire writers to actually write articles, or designers to design a landing page for you. And also, I do see quite a lot of gaming apps going for this option. It really just comes down to the unique selling point of your app.

Like I mentioned before, you’ve got to come up with a piece of content that would benefit from having that extra step. If an app is plain and simple, and it’s free—which is the case with a lot of gaming apps—or if it competes on pricing, then you just want to send them to the App Store as fast as you can. You don’t want to have an extra step in the funnel, where you could lose people. So the App Store flow makes so much more sense, if that’s your app.

But if your app is, say, high-end. Maybe it requires a bit of explanation like, for example, Blinkist. It was the first of its kind, really, and it is so hard to explain what we do in one sentence or in 300 characters. Having this extra article or landing page made a lot of sense. It really got the buy-in from the users. So in that case, you want to go with the content flow.

It is the same with really pricey apps. There are some apps out there, which charge maybe 100 euros per month. They really should have an extra landing page or article that explains why people should pay that much money to use their app every month.

Shamanth: If this is an easy sell, they probably don’t need to go to a landing page. But if a user needs more education, then the landing page makes more sense.

Sandra: Exactly. The key question here is: “Is it free or not?”

I’ve talked to quite a few advertisers where they say that Outbrain and Taboola doesn’t work for them. And then they say our app is free. Our benchmark is cost per install. And I’m thinking, yeah, you shouldn’t have tried this flow. If the only thing you’re looking at is cost per install, this will not benefit you.

Shamanth: With the landing page or the article, how do you think about what content should be there, what selling points should be there, and how it needs to be structured?

Sandra: It all comes down to setting expectations. It depends on what headline you decided to go with in the beginning.

Let’s say, we have a food delivery app. And you decided that your first test is going to be an ad, where it says, ‘Americans are loving this food delivery app!’ Then, you can probably be a little bit salesy in the content, because people are genuinely curious about your app.

But if your PR team tells you, “Oh, I don’t really feel comfortable with being that tacky. Can we go with something that’s a little bit more like PR’. You then go with a headline like, ‘Food delivery app reveals what Americans eat’. If that’s the case, then you have to focus on giving people that insight first, before you go on talking about your app.

So it’s really just about setting expectations. And it’s not rocket science. I think, if you read the news enough, then you’ll know how some of these articles look. It minimizes the gap in expectations.

Shamanth: This makes me wonder if you could either be very salesy or at least pitch your product very clearly and obviously, or it could be more educational, like 5 tips article. In fact, I can think of some marketers who would say, “Oh, we don’t want to be too salesy, too pitchy.” Do you think that’s a good idea?

Sandra: I think either could work. I personally don’t like to be overly salesy, but I also don’t like the approach where you talk about everything before you talk about the app. This is probably the instinct of a lot of content marketers who feel that they should just provide 800 words of insight before they even say, ‘Hey, by the way, we have an app.’ That doesn’t work because people are not going to stick around and read what’s at the very bottom.

I also don’t like articles where it’s less about being too salesy, but being too salesy for that headline. Unless your headline says, ‘This is everything you need to know about this app’, then your article shouldn’t be completely salesy. You got to provide some other value as well.

You can do either one, actually, as long as you set the expectations right, and you don’t talk about your app too late. So if you want to go all in and talk about everything that’s great about your app, make it clear in the headline. Because if those poor souls, who are clicking on this, are not warned about what’s coming up, they’re gonna be pissed and they’ll bounce. And that’s not good for you.

So as long as you prepare everyone for what’s about to come, then that’s totally fine. You can be salesy.

Shamanth: Right. What I’m taking away is how important it is to be fully aligned with your entire flow, from the headline of the ad, the headline of the article to the article itself. Yeah. So Sandra, what would you say are some of the common mistakes that marketers make when setting up paid content marketing campaigns?

Sandra: As you can probably tell by the theme of my answer so far, I think not coming up with good content is a major mistake.

What I see a lot of app marketers doing is that they start these channels thinking that it’s very similar to Facebook and Google. And they take the best ads from these platforms, and then recycle it for Outbrain and Taboola. So then they end up with a problem where the headlines sound like an ad, but then you’re not going to the App Store right away; you have a landing page, and that’s only going to cost you.

What I would recommend is that people forget about what works on Facebook and Google, because they’re just entirely different animals and come up with content that would be suitable for these channels.

One of the other issues with not coming up with good content is also the thing you mentioned, where people are too afraid of being salesy. And they don’t mention their product until the last step. And this happens a lot more than you would think. Out of all the marketers I talked to, maybe two-thirds of them make this kind of mistake.

Also, another mistake would be not looking at the conversions further down the funnel. If you were to compare Outbrain and Taboola with Facebook and Google, just on cost per install, it’s probably not going to be better. But the payoff really comes later on, because you’ve spent a little bit more acquiring these leads, who have read more about your product.

Let’s assume that your app is a paid app, these people are probably going to be more likely to purchase—they might even go for the higher package just because they’re so convinced— they’re probably less likely to cancel, and more likely to renew. So the lifetime value is actually higher. But if you’re only looking at the first metric, which is just installs, you’re not going to be able to see that. And of course, these campaigns wouldn’t do that well. Maybe one month down the road, start revisiting these metrics and see, maybe it’s actually paying off. So, it’s probably not as bad as people think.

Shamanth: Yeah. It’s important to look at your entire funnel holistically, to see the downstream impact of all of your marketing. Sandra, this has been very instructive for me, and not just about paid content, but also about how to think about marketing holistically. I really do appreciate you taking the time today. This seems like a good place for us to wrap. Before we do that, could you tell folks how they can find out more about you and everything you do?

Sandra: You search for me, Sandra Wu Blinkist on LinkedIn. You can follow me or you can add me. Otherwise, I also have a copywriting course at The Art of Content Marketing.com; you can get my email address from there as well. So please get in touch if you want to connect. I’d be happy to talk.

Shamanth: Wonderful, we will link to all of that in the show notes. Sandra, thank you so much for being with us on the Mobile User Acquisition Show with me. Appreciate you taking the time.

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