Outbrain DSP offers hundreds of demographic, intent, and professional targeting segments you can add to your ad groups. Utilize Outbrain and third-party data to target (or exclude) consumers based on their unique attributes.
IMPORTANT: Targeting custom audiences will incur a data fee on top of your CPC, which will be automatically calculated as your total CPC. Audience prices are expressed in CPM.
Interest Targeting and Demographics
Interest targeting allows you to narrow your target audience depending on the content they have previously engaged with by choosing one or more Outbrain Interest categories to include or exclude. This option allows you to select your target audience segment based on the topics that they’re most interested in. Interest segments are available in ad group settings under Outbrain. You can go ahead and start including and/or excluding interests by selecting each category from the drop-down menu or by typing in the category name.
You are also able to target Outbrain's proprietary demographic segments, currently available for all English-language-targeted campaigns, with a price of $0.50 CPM. You can expect a gradual rollout of additional languages during 2024.
In addition to Outbrain audiences, you can target hundreds of demographic, behavioral, purchase intent, and professional targeting segments from supported third-party data providers - Nielsen and Eyeota. You can reach people based on their offline behavior, such as owning a house, purchasing a new car, marital status, professional occupation, and many other categories.
Audience Targeting Best Practices
We recommend using all media sources, as using just one or two will limit your reach extremely.
Instead of immediately creating a list of included audience segments, start with a list of excluded segments to keep your targeting open.
There is no need to create an included and excluded list - if you're using included audiences, the remaining ones are already considered excluded, and vice versa.
We do not recommend including audience targeting when using an allowlist.
Expect higher average CPCs when using interest targeting, as your targeting will narrow.
Setting up Audience Targeting
Start by clicking on the + Add button using the Audience targeting option.
Click on the + Audience button to start creating the Audience A segment.
You can add audience categories by typing in a category name or by browsing through categories from the drop-down menu. You can browse through different data providers and add as many categories as you need, with the relationship between categories being OR.
To create another “mix & match” segment, click on the + Audience once again to start creating the Audience B segment. Repeat the same procedure from step 3. You can add as many audience segments as you need, with the relationship between segments being AND.
To explicitly avoid targeting some categories, you should add them to the exclude option in the same way as adding categories to the include option, with the relationship between categories being OR.
Example: If you select the categories “Ages 35 – 44” and “Sports Football,” your campaign will target audiences who are between the ages of 35 and 44 OR people who like football. However, if you put those categories in two separate audience segments, the AND logic will only target people who are in those age ranges AND who also like football. Please keep in mind that using AND logic will reduce your campaign’s potential reach due to the audience becoming increasingly niche.
To summarize, you will see and use all supported audience data sources for targeting segmented into categories and subcategories and construct new custom audience segments by using logic operators AND, OR, and EXCLUDING.
When adding categories to a custom segment, you will see prices for specific segments and the total price calculated at the bottom.
How Total Price Is Calculated
Attribute targeting segments have a cost that will be added to the campaign’s CPC. If an impression comes from a user that is in the targeted segment, the impression will be charged the cost of that segment in addition to the CPC. These data fees will come from the campaign’s budget, meaning if you use these segments, you may see fewer overall impressions as some of your budgets will be allocated to the fees.
When you receive an impression, our system will check and see if it came from an audience in one of the attribute segments you were targeting. Even if the impression came from multiple segments, you’ll only be charged once.
The exception to this would be when using a segment in the AND section from multiple data vendors, which means that you’re looking for audiences that are included in both segments. In this case, you may be charged for two segments: one for the segment in the Include section and another for the AND section. Our system will automatically calculate these charges based on the selected segment.
IMPORTANT: Each DMP automatically syncs with Outbrain DSP to determine the maximum CPM price for each category.
One Category + One DMP:
The maximum CPM price is set by the provider and shown by the selected segment.
Multiple Categories + One DMP:
We take the highest maximum CPM price from selected segments into consideration when calculating the final cost.
Multiple Categories + Multiple DMPs:
We take the highest maximum CPM price from each sourced DMP into consideration and sum these prices into the final data cost for each audience segment.
PLEASE NOTE: A complex combination of categories from multiple DMPs could result in very high data spending.
First Party Audiences
Through our DMP integrations with Nielsen, Eyeota, LiveRamp, and Neodata, marketers can further include or exclude their first-party data segments.
For more information, please contact our Customer Success team.
