In my opinion, the choice of whether or not to install one of these widgets on your blog is a no-brainer. There are no drawbacks, unless you maybe have a small and infrequently updated blog with a limited amount of posts such as this one. In that case, you might want to hold off on it until you've built up a decent amount of posts or articles. However, if you have an established blog with a healthy number of posts, then you are missing out if you don't have a related post widget.
The only real question, and one not so easily answered is, of the many available solutions out there, which one do I use?
LinkWithin? YARPP? Outbrain? IGIT? nRelate? SimpleReach?
As you can see, there are several competing widgets designed to display related posts on your blog, and at first glance all the most popular ones do look similar and seem to be worthy choices. However, as I will point out below, there are some important differences to be aware of when making your selection.
I've been blogging for about 18 months now, and for most of that time I've been using a related posts plugin on my main blog, Bonjour Tristesse. Over that time, I've thoroughly examined a few of these offerings, namely LinkWithin, Outbrain and nRelate. The most of the others are designed exclusively for Wordpress blogs, so I couldn't consider them for my Blogger blog. In this post I will share my overall experiences with those three to help you choose the right one for you.
LinkWithin
No doubt currently the most popular related posts widget around, LinkWithin is an established presence and brand that practically everyone in the blogosphere is aware of. When I was starting out, I saw it on quite a few other blogs, so naturally it was also the first one I tried out.
To its credit, LinkWithin is a very simple and easy solution to add to your blog. You don't have to sign up, and with just a few effortless clicks you can be up and running. If a simple set and forget solution is what you are after then LinkWithin is an excellent choice.
I used it for the first 3 months or so of my blog's existence, and was completely happy with its functions. However, as I started to get the hang of things, I began tinkering more and more with my blog, learning how to customize various things from within Blogger, I also began to become frustrated by the lack of options offered by LinkWithin, and it's lack of tracking statistics. I found its simplicity to be a curse, as the only thing you can easily change is the amount of posts shown.
So I began the search for an alternative to try out, which led me to...
Outbrain
I don't recall how exactly I came to discover Outbrain, whether I saw it on another blog or found it by Google, but I was glad I did.
What initially attracted me was the cleaner default layout, one with only a tiny unobtrusive [?] in the bottom right corner, and also their claim of a more advanced widget, one that promised increased traffic by personalizing the links shown according to advanced algorithms, instead of simple random selections like LinkWithin.
Outbrain also had the same option of an easy-to-add free widget with no signup required, but I was enticed to sign-up in order to gain access to advanced features like a ratings system (since removed) and most importantly, reporting statistics to track the effectiveness of the widget.
Not all was roses though. After installing the Outbrain widget, I discovered that it was showing up in an odd position, on top of my Read More jump-links, not exactly the optimum placement for it; also there was very little whitespace between the widget and the post body, making it look cramped and cluttered; furthermore, each of the post titles shown also unnecessarily included my blog name at the end.
In the hopes of resolving those three issues I went over to their support forum and to no surprise found existing threads created by other bloggers with the same problems. What was unexpected and impressive though, was the rapid and friendly responses I received from multiple members of the Outbrain staff who worked quickly to fix the widget for me within hours of my requests. Until this point, I had never experienced such rapid and effective personal support, from a private company for a completely free service.
Unfortunately though, it seems they haven't kept up as well with this side of their business, as I have a more recent, less satisfactory encounter with Outbrain's support that I will get into a bit later.
Anyhow, I happily used the Outbrain widget for the next 9 months. During this time, I ran into no further issues with their widget, and everything continued to work nicely as my blog steadily grew. I especially loved using their neatly laid out dashboard to periodically check up on my stats reports.
Although I was seeing a decent CTR (Click Through Rate), with an average of 4.75% between January to September 2011. I couldn't help but begin to wonder about the true effectiveness of these 'personalized links', links which often appeared to be completely unrelated to the current post. So I started looking around to see if there might not be an even better alternative to Outbrain.
Enter the latest challenger nRelate...
nRelate
While researching for a new widget I noticed a lot of positive buzz for nRelate, a relative newcomer to the content recommendation game, offering yet another simple to use and easy to install widget, with claims of a 5-12% page view increase, and a very impressive amount of widget customization options. I decided to give them a 90 day test run at Bonjour Tristesse.
Just like the others, nRelate gives you the option of installing without signing up, but then you don't get access to their superior customizing features, nor do you get to see the all important usage statistics.
One point to be aware of here, installation on your blog is not nearly as immediate as the others. nRelate says it takes about 2 hours after installing for the widget to begin to show up on your blog. In my experience it was more like 8 hours.
But once it does appear, you can login and change a wide array of settings that none of the other guys offer. Such as: the choice of several different thumbnail sizes; the ability to use your own custom default image; a half dozen different preset layout themes; the ability to completely disable the nRelate logo if you wish; and the most interesting one, you can toggle the degree of relevance you want your resulting links to have from low, medium, or high.
On my blog, I found the high setting was not very practical, returning only a limited number of links and sometimes none at all. The medium was slightly better, but still quite often didn't come up with the maximum 4 links that I had it set to. I had to settle for the low setting to guarantee a consistent amount of link results. Of course your results will vary depending on the amount and type of content on your blog.
All of that fancy stuff is nice, but ultimately what I was after was an increase in CTR over what I was previously getting from Outbrain. So most important for me was access to nRelate's reporting features to keep an eye on things.
Unfortunately, a couple of weeks after installing the widget, nRelate rolled out a system update which inadvertently caused me to lose the ability to see my stats. After failing to find a support link via the dashboard menu—there currently still isn't one—I finally noticed a nondescript support email address published in the welcome screen after you log in.
I sent an email to this address detailing my problem and received no response or acknowledgment for days. Eventually I discovered a link to their support forums in the footer of their main site and made a post there which was answered relatively quickly and got my problem taken care of. If anyone from nRelate ends up reading this, you guys may want to consider adding a link to the support forums in a visible location somewhere within the logged in partner dashboard.
With access to the stats restored, things rolled along smoothly for the remainder of my time with nRelate. I did find that the nRelate stats reports are much simpler and not quite as detailed (for example there is no way to see which of your articles is the most popular), and the charts and tables are not as visually fetching as Outbrain's very well designed reporting screens. Also, if you are an advanced user, they lack the ability to export your numbers into an Excel spreadsheet.
After 90 days, my average CTR from nRelate ended up being a disappointing 3.29%. A 1.5% drop from Outbrain. That might not sound like much, but for every 10,000 page views, that is an extra 150 hits lost. Of course this wasn't any kind of controlled scientific experiment, and there are many factors that could have contributed to this lower CTR, but the positive experience I've had with Outbrain in the past, combined with the more user friendly interface and advanced stats prompted me to switch back.
I do still highly recommend nRelate though, especially for its very extensive customization features, and for one other thing I haven't mentioned - the fact that they do not perform any redirection on the links in their widget. I'm not entirely sure of the SEO implications of link redirection, but both the LinkWithin and Outbrain widgets briefly redirect your visitors to their internal sites before bouncing them back to you. Although I personally have not found this to be a problem, some have claimed that this is in effect 'stealing your link juice' so it is something to be aware of.
Conclusion - Return to Outbrain
I switched back to using the Outbrain related posts widget on January 1, 2012 and immediately noticed a problem with the wrong thumbnails being scraped from my latest posts. I headed straight for the support forums where I had great results in the past and opened up a ticket.
Knowing it was New Years and the holiday season I didn't expect a lightning fast response, nor did I get one. I eventually got a response on January 4 that didn't quite solve my issue, but at least I had acknowledgement. After I replied back for clarification, I uncharacteristically did not receive any further communication until almost a month later. Finally on February 2, just as I was about to throw in the towel and head back to nRelate, someone from Outbrain came to my aid and fixed my problem. Hopefully things are back to normal now, but I haven't had any issues since, so I don't know if their response times have improved.
Despite the support delays, I will be staying with them for the time being, especially since my click rates have returned to what they were before. But I will also keep a close eye on nRelate as they remain an extremely viable alternative that with a few improvements could easily become my first choice.
Content marketing is one of the powerful way to increase engagement of your readers, audience and while doing this, increase your revenue and make some more money.
From very popular content marketing tactics, I have recently introduced 10 Free and Popular Curation Services which let marketers combine interesting content from various blogs in a newspaper format and serve it to there audience. While doing this, they increase their own blog exposure and revenue by putting content, advertisements etc.
While searching for different content marketing strategies, I came to know about content recommendation platforms which is another very fast growing and powerful tactic that many websites are using right now. Content marketing services serve content of other websites as recommendation to a website’s readers.
3rd Party Content Recommendations At PCMag Using Outbrain
What These Services Do?
These service perform two major tasks. They either help companies (considered as advertisers) to build audience, increase traffic and pageviews to their websites or let websites (considered as publishers) to increase revenue by adding recommendations widget that have 3rd party content.There are mainly two content recommendation services Outbrain and Taboola that popular websites use. Out of both the services, choosing the best which perform better for your business and provide maximum benefit is a bit tough task.
So, if you’ve planned to use these content distribution and discovery platforms, this article will help you choose best service for you.
Outbrain
Outbrain is most trusted and leading content discovery platform on the web. The site is online since 2004 and serving its high-quality service to many of the world leading websites from then.
The Reach
- Outbrain is being used by many mainstream brands including FAST COMPANY, TIME, CNN, PCMag, etc.
- 50 billion content recommendation served per month
- 21,000 links to content shown every second
- 90,000+ blogs and websites are using the network
For Publishers
- Engage your audience by serving best content from websites around the world.
- Increase pageviews ans time spent on site.
- Offer more personalized experience
- Generate revenue. Enjoy CTR well above industry average, generate revenue below the fold, increase inventory of your highest value pages.
- Customize look.
- Track real-time analytics.
For Advertisers
- Your content’s recommendations will appear on web’s largest content publishers including sites like WSJ, Reuters, People.com etc.
- Serve your content in front of right audience.
- Attract new and high-quality audience to your site.
- You can promote blog posts, videos, slideshows, mobile-optimized content.
- Flexible pay-per-click model.
Taboola
Taboola is another content discovery network. Yet new but it is growing very fast as compare to Outbrain. The service has even took some premium deals from Outbrain.
The Reach
- Over 3 billion recommendations served daily.
- 300 million unique users monthly.
- 1 million pieces of content available in the marketplace.
- Brands like The New York Times, BBC, boston.com, TIME, Cracked.com, Forbes, TMZ, USAToday, Examiner.com, MakeUseOf, etc.
For Publishers
- Generate direct revenue by surfacing Taboola’s high quality sponsored content.
- Boost site traffic and pageviews by serving personalized Taboola’s recommendations.
- Boost RPM and serve content of high-quality brands such as NBC, CBS and NYTimes.
- Works with all devices and any type of content.
- Taboola’s cutting-edge discovery engine has proven to deliver 50% – 300% CTRs.
For Advertisers
- Serve your content as recommendation on TIME, USA Today, TMZ, Cracked.
- Reach 300+ Million people.
- Attract massive new audience that are targeted, engaged and interesting to consume content on your site.
- As Taboola serves 3B recommendations a day on various platforms, so your site will get consistent, high-quality and scalable traffic.
- Track analytics. Gain insights into your content performance around the world.
The Difference
Explained by Saad Baasi, Co-Founder of largest digital publishing company of Pakistan which has a reach of 30 million unique visitors every month and serves over 1 billion pageview.Any Good Alternatives?
It has been found that Taboola and Outbrain work with very large publishers holding over 500k+ monthly pageviews. So if you have are search for any good alternatives to these great content discovery platforms, check out these services:nRelate
nRelate is using a very similar approach while letting small publishers to monitize through content recommendations strategy too. There service is being used by CNET, ZDNet, GameSpot, Tech Republic, CBS News are using this service to better engage their audience and increase there revenue. With nRelate Related content WordPress Plugin, its implementation has become very easier.At the advertisers point of view, your content can be recommend through CNET, ZDNet, Tech Republic etc.
Gravity
Gravity is another widely used content discovery and distribution platform. The company is online since 2009. It delivers over 25 million content recommendations each day to 200 million users.
When you use a website or application powered by Gravity, it adapts to create a better experience just for you. Using its proprietary Interest Graph, Gravity semantically understands each user’s individual interests, calculates the strength of those attachments over time and returns recommendations designed to optimize engagement and user experience.
MGID
Another very old content discovery network having 17,000 partner websites and 19 million unique visitors every month. However, the service serves engaging recommendations to the visitors but generally there recommendations are not family safe (slightly mature). So its better to use this service for celebs, entertainment related blogs and not in professional, technology, business blogs.Advantage: Free Service.
Some of the MGID Recommendations
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