What would you pay to get your content onto well-known sites like MSN or Forbes and drive traffic back to your own site? This isn’t a rhetorical question; it’s what you should ask as you start considering content syndication. Content syndication tools push your content onto third-party sites — you’ll see this content often displayed as thumbnails and headlines in a section labeled something like “From Around the Web.”

Content syndication tools like Taboola and Outbrain help content reach new audiences and increase traffic to your site. No matter which tool you choose, you’ll benefit from learning all you can from your representative or account manager.

What’s the Best Way to Set Up Campaigns?

If you’re an experienced social media marketer, you probably have a few paid campaigns under your belt. If you’re a savvy social media marketer, you know that you can’t set up paid campaigns the same way across social media platforms — much less the same on a content syndication program.

The first thing you must ask your representative is exactly how to set up a campaign. Should a campaign be organized by target audience (filter parameters) or content? What ins and outs of setup should you know before you get started?

Save yourself the hassle of having to pause and create all new ads by setting up campaigns correctly from the start.

How Best Can I Use A/B Testing on This Platform?

While driving traffic to your site may be the main objective of your content syndication strategy, that shouldn’t be the only achievement. Take advantage of this paid media opportunity by leveraging A/B testing. Does this audience engage more with technical or layman’s terminology? Do people respond to a tone of urgency? Do people click abstract illustrations or people and object images more often?

You want to find out not only which articles people respond most to, but also why. A/B testing within campaigns helps solve that. Through our content syndication for clients, we’ve gained insights on the best headlines and images to employ in both content and social media strategies.

When Should I Start Optimizing Campaigns?

Don’t take your content off a particular site or pause ads before they have had the chance to find their reach. The balance between giving your ads enough time to perform and wasting precious dollars on inefficient ads is delicate. Your rep will have an idea of how many impressions an ad should reach before being reviewed for optimization. Depending on budget and audience, that benchmark may be 10,000 impressions, or it may be 100,000 impressions. The trick is to monitor ads across all key performance indicators throughout a campaign life cycle, and not just clickthrough rate (CTR), which can be a deceiving metric if an ad is clicked a lot and viewed a little.

Once it’s established when to optimize a campaign, it’s time to pause low performers, boost top performers, and possibly even create more ads.

What’s the Average Benchmark for Content Fed to This Industry or Target Audience?

So you laid out your objectives, implemented the campaign, and compiled the analytics. Great! But the work is not quite done yet. Before you present results, it’s crucial to understand the context of them. How did the average CTR compare to similar brands using this tool? What’s the industry benchmark you can compare your results to? You can’t improve and optimize future campaigns without an understanding of the big picture.

Need help adding content syndication to your paid media strategy? Let’s talk.