$1.09M on Taboola and Outbrain: A Native Advertising Case
An agency put $1.09M into Taboola and Outbrain in one month for a D2C shoe brand. Reported numbers, test plan, metric order, and what transfers to iGaming.
In January 2024 an agency spent $1,092,670 on native advertising for a single direct-to-consumer orthopedic-shoe brand: $935,080 on Taboola and $157,590 on Outbrain. It reported a 2.39 ROAS across the US, Canada, Australia and Germany. All figures come from the agency's own write-up and were not independently verified.
Results at a glance
| Metric | Value | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Ad spend | $1,092,670 | Taboola $935,080, Outbrain $157,590; reported by the agency, not independently verified |
| Period | January 1–31, 2024 | Labelled the peak month; reported by the agency |
| ROAS / ROI | 2.39 / 139% | Reported by the agency, not independently verified. The post does not say whether this is revenue or profit based |
| Agency fee | $163,900 | 15% of spend; reported by the agency |
| Geos | US, Canada, Australia, Germany | No per-geo split disclosed |
| Vertical | D2C footwear, buyers 40+ | Reported by the agency |
If the 2.39 is revenue divided by ad spend, that implies roughly $2.6 million in revenue (1,092,670 x 2.39). That is our arithmetic on an assumption; the agency did not publish revenue.
Context
This is a public example of native advertising at seven-figure spend in a single peak month. It comes with the agency's testing method but not its funnel results: landing-page CTR, CPM and CPA for the brand are not reported. Native ads are paid placements styled like the content around them, usually "recommended" story units under articles on news sites; our native advertising definition covers the formats.
The write-up came from Xevio, an agency whose co-owner says he was Taboola's director for Eastern Europe and Israel. It was published as a guest post. By its own account the agency also works with Taboola, Outbrain and other networks on advertiser training and discounted buying tools, and it calls its case studies a kind of advertorial. Read it as partly promotional.
Why these two networks? The agency pointed to large publisher inventory and cold traffic at volume. It also said that having an established account manager usually means a rejected ad comes back with reasons and suggested edits, not a silent account block. That is its experience, not a network commitment.
One caveat up front: this is e-commerce, not iGaming. The workflow transfers to casino and sports betting offers. The numbers do not.
What they did: native advertising on Taboola and Outbrain
Product choice. The agency says it picked orthopedic shoes a few months before the campaign because the niche was thin on native at the time and the unit economics worked. Its working rule is that a native product should be an impulse buy for one person: no business purchase, nothing a household has to agree on. The networks' readers skew older, and the shoe was aimed at buyers over 40.
Geos. The agency says it often opens tests in Germany because most of its team writes German, and it did so here. The rollout order was Germany, then the US, then the other English-language markets once US results were stable.
Test budget. The brand agreed a four-week, $20,000 test: $10,000 in each of two large geos.
How the agency read the numbers. The core decision rule concerns the pre-lander, the story page between the ad and the store. If fewer than 15–20% of its visitors click on to the product page, the agency treats the story as the problem and rewrites it; in its view, creative or site-list work done before that point is wasted. CPA, the number the client actually pays attention to, is the last of the three figures it ranks, behind landing-page CTR and then CPM.
By the agency's account, a pre-lander gets a landing-page CTR verdict in about two days, so the first fortnight leaves room for as many as 15 versions. That pace only works if several versions run in parallel, and the post does not say how many it ran on this brand.
Bidding. On Taboola, the agency used Maximize Conversions with a CPA target. The agency's view is that this setup burns campaigns out about three times faster, but lets a test be judged in a couple of days once it has 50, ideally 100, conversions. Taboola's own help centre is more conservative, as of October 2026. It advises running without a CPA target until a campaign records at least 50 conversions in seven consecutive days, expects a higher CPA while the algorithm learns over the first two to five days, and asks for a daily budget of at least 10 times the expected CPA.
Creatives. The brand ran three families of creative, kept in separate sets: product-only, people with the product, and problem-led GIFs.
Results
Taboola carried about 86% of the spend and Outbrain about 14% (our arithmetic). The agency's 15% fee came to $163,900. By the agency's count, reaching that volume took more than 50 pre-landers and several hundred creatives.
The agency labelled the 2.39 ROAS and 139% ROI as the return the campaign would have shown outside its fee-based agency model. The post does not define either figure, and gives no revenue, product cost, shipping, return rate or margin. If ROI here means (revenue minus ad spend) divided by ad spend, it is not profit. See our guide to affiliate metrics such as EPC, ROAS and CPA for how these ratios relate.
The guest post is also loose on timing ("a few months ago", "recently"), so do not read January 2024 as a picture of today's auction prices.
Risks and limits
Copycats. The agency reports that rivals entered over the following months, some undercutting on price and some selling a cheaper version of the shoe. It says it does not recommend entering the niche with a new product.
Short product life. In the agency's account, consumer-goods angles on native fade and seasonal products take their place.
Thin disclosure. One month of data, no brand name, no revenue, margin, order count, return rate or geo split, and no actual landing-page CTR, CPM or CPA.
Interested source. The agency earns from media buying and from network-linked training and tools.
Dated platform setup. Outbrain bought Teads in February 2025 and took the Teads name that June, and Taboola's advertiser help centre now sits under its Realize brand. Interfaces and policies have moved since January 2024.
Takeaways for affiliates running native advertising
Judge the pre-lander before anything else. For casino and betting traffic, this is the story or review page that sends readers to the operator. The 15–20% click-on bar is the agency's threshold, not an industry standard, but if your page sits well below it, bid and site tweaks will not rescue the campaign. To find where readers give up on the page, a free session-recording and heatmap tool such as Microsoft Clarity, which the agency used, is enough.
Size the test to the bid strategy. The brand ran a fixed $20,000, four-week test. Taboola's help article asks for a daily budget of 10–15 times the expected CPA while the algorithm learns, so a $50 CPA target implies $500–$750 a day (an illustration, not a figure from this case). Compare this with our popunder traffic case when choosing which traffic source to test.
Check CTR before you cut a rising CPM. If click-through on the ad rose along with the CPM, the agency reads that as the ad winning more of the auction, and trimming bids would give that delivery back. Buyers coming from Meta, where a lower CPM is the usual goal, often see the same move as a cost leak. That is the agency's reading, not a network rule.
Expect iGaming to be harder on these networks. Gambling ads are limited to approved geos and, in the US, to specific states and products, with in-state disclaimers on landing pages. Teads asks for licence or state-registration proof, by market. Plan for fewer markets than an e-commerce brand gets.
Label advertorials as ads. The FTC expects a click-through page that promotes a product to be identifiable as an ad, unless it is obviously one. It has pursued ad agencies and operators of affiliate advertising networks as well as advertisers, so check the label on the pre-lander, not just on the ad.
Use site lists to close the CPA gap, not to open a test. In the agency's sequence, whitelists and blacklists came last, after the pre-lander and the bid were working, as the tool for bringing CPA down to target. Our explainer on ad fraud covers what to exclude. If you buy through a CPA network rather than the ad network itself, see CPA networks versus ad networks.
FAQ
What is native advertising and how is it different from display ads?
Native advertising is a paid placement that matches the look of the surrounding content, such as a sponsored story in a recommendation widget. Display ads are banners that look like ads. More in our explainer.
How much does native advertising cost?
There is no fixed price. Networks such as Taboola and Outbrain run auctions, typically billed per click. In this case the brand agreed a four-week, $20,000 test; the agency reports $1.09 million of spend in its peak month, January 2024.
Can affiliates run casino or betting offers on Taboola and Outbrain?
Only in limited cases. As of its May 2025 update, Taboola's gambling policy FAQ allowed online casino ads in six US states and sports betting ads in 19, with in-state disclaimers, and calls the list non-exhaustive. Teads, the corporate name Outbrain adopted in June 2025, lists fewer US states: New Jersey, Nevada and Delaware for gambling, New Jersey and Nevada for sports betting. That page does not say whether it covers Outbrain-sourced native inventory, so confirm with your account manager.
How do you spot native advertising?
On recommendation widgets you will usually see labels such as "Sponsored" or "Promoted" near a headline or the network's name. The FTC says "Promoted" is at best ambiguous and prefers "Ad", "Advertisement" or "Sponsored Advertising Content". It also expects the click-through page to be identifiable as an ad unless it is obviously one. This is a summary of FTC guidance, not legal advice.
Sources
Xevio guest case study, Russian-language affiliate publication, accessed October 2026 (origin of all campaign figures)
