At a glance
Total revenue Outbrain claims as attributed to its campaigns over the selected period. The numerator of ROAS. Reads conversions_value from Outbrain’s reporting API, the figure the conversion pixel sent at purchase. Outbrain’s claimed revenue is materially smaller than the merchant’s commerce-platform revenue because Outbrain only counts orders attributed to its 30-day-click window.
| What it counts | SUM(conversions_value) across all campaigns in the marketer account, summed over the time window. The pixel sends value at the order-confirmation page; whatever value-key was configured at pixel-setup is what gets summed (typically order subtotal incl. tax incl. shipping, but configurable). |
| Currency | Account currency. If the merchant runs multiple Outbrain marketer accounts (one per region), the card sums after FX conversion to a single display currency using the daily ECB rate. |
| Conversion attribution model | Last-click within a 30-day window (Outbrain default). Configurable per conversion event in Conversions → Settings → Attribution Window. View-through conversions are NOT counted in this metric; they are tracked separately as “view conversions”. |
| Attribution window | 30-day click + 1-day view by default. Native discovery has a long impression-to-purchase lag; the 30-day window is materially wider than search platforms. |
| Conversion-value definition | Whatever the pixel sends. If pixel sends subtotal, ROAS is computed against subtotal; if total (incl. tax + shipping), against total. Most merchants send total, but check your pixel implementation; the card cannot tell the difference. |
| Multi-touch reality | This card claims credit for orders where the last click was Outbrain. In a multi-touch journey (Outbrain seed → branded search → email reminder → purchase), the final touch typically gets credit elsewhere; Outbrain’s claimed revenue under-states the channel’s true incremental contribution. Lift studies are the rigorous way to size that gap. |
| Long settlement tail | Native-discovery’s view-to-purchase lag means today’s revenue is 50 to 70 percent of the eventual settled figure; conversions arrive over the following 3 days. Don’t make decisions on partial-day or even partial-week data. |
| Refresh cadence | Hourly; conversions may take 24 to 72 hours to settle. |
| Time window | T/7D/30D vsP (today / 7-day / 30-day, vs prior period). |
| Alert trigger | drop >20% vsP. The most common cause is pixel breakage (recent code deploy that removed the Outbrain tag), not channel performance. |
| Roles | owner, marketing, finance |
Calculation
Calculated automatically from your Outbrain data. See the At a glance summary above for what the metric tracks and the worked example below for a typical reading.Worked example
The same UK lifestyle brand from the Total Spend example, AOV £68, Outbrain at £14k/month for cold-prospecting. Reading taken at 09:00 GMT on 28 Mar 26 for the trailing 30 days.| Day-0 status (live readings) | 30-day window |
|---|---|
| Outbrain claimed revenue (this card) | £33,270 |
| Shopify total revenue, same window | £491,800 |
| Outbrain spend (peer card) | £14,250 |
| Outbrain claimed ROAS | 2.34× |
| Outbrain’s share of total Shopify revenue | 6.8% |
- Outbrain claims £33k of revenue against £14k of spend, 2.34× last-click ROAS. Healthy band for cold-prospecting.
- Outbrain claims 6.8 percent of total Shopify revenue this period. That’s the attributed-to-Outbrain slice. A lift study (running Outbrain off for 14 days and measuring the dip in branded search and direct revenue) typically reveals the true incremental contribution is 30 to 60 percent of the claimed figure, in this case roughly £10k to £20k of incremental revenue, not £33k. The 2.34× headline ROAS, when restated as incremental ROAS, drops to 0.7× to 1.4×, meaning Outbrain may or may not be profit-positive depending on the brand’s contribution margin.
- The conversion-value definition matters. This brand’s pixel sends
total(subtotal + tax + shipping). For a £68 AOV order with 20 percent VAT and £4 shipping, the pixel sends £85.60 (subtotal £56.67 + VAT £11.33 + shipping £4 + tax-on-shipping £0.80 + post-discount adjustment). Outbrain’s revenue figure aligns with the pixel; the merchant’s gross-margin calculation should pair against subtotal or net-of-tax. Don’t compute contribution margin off this card directly without normalising for tax/shipping. - The “revenue dropped 25 percent overnight” debug case. If today’s revenue reads £580 against a 30-day daily average of £1,109, three checks: (1) Conversion Lag, today’s number is incomplete by design (50-70 percent of eventual settled), wait 24-48h; (2) pixel-fire health on a freshly deployed page, view source on the order-confirmation page and look for
_obctx, missing tag is the most common cause of sudden drops; (3) attribution-window changes, did anyone change the conversion event’s window setting in the past week? Outbrain logs that change in the audit trail. - Compare 30-day vs prior 30-day. Prior window had revenue £34,720, ROAS 2.51×. Revenue down 4 percent, ROAS down 7 percent. Spend up 3 percent. The combination is “scaling beyond efficient frontier”, a small warning shape. Hold budget flat for 14 days and re-measure; if the trend continues, cut.
Sibling cards merchants should reference together
| Card | Why pair it with Total Revenue | What the combination tells you |
|---|---|---|
| Total Spend | The denominator of ROAS. | Together they form ROAS; both moving in opposite directions is the meaningful signal. |
| ROAS | The single-number summary. | Revenue moves materially while ROAS holds equals proportional spend change; revenue down + ROAS up means spend cut faster than revenue, healthy discipline. |
| Conversions Trend | The conversion-volume side. | Revenue dropping with conversions flat means AOV / value-per-conversion fell, mix shift to lower-value SKUs. |
| Conversion Lag | View-to-purchase latency. | Use to interpret today’s revenue, partial-window data is misleading without lag context. |
| Conversion Drop | Real-time drop alert. | Fires before this card’s drop >20% vsP alert, treat as early warning. |
| Revenue by Campaign | Per-campaign breakdown. | Headline revenue holding while a single high-revenue campaign collapses is hidden, this is where it surfaces. |
| Cross-connector: Shopify Total Revenue, BigCommerce Total Revenue, Adobe Commerce Total Revenue | Truth-side benchmark. | Outbrain claims a fraction of these; use the ratio to estimate channel contribution. |
| Cross-connector: GA4 Revenue by Channel | Independent attribution check. | GA4 attributes Outbrain-driven revenue based on UTM tagging; the two should track in direction, not in absolute. |
Reconciling against the vendor’s own dashboard
Where to look in Outbrain’s own dashboard:Outbrain Amplify → Reports → Performance → Conversions → Total Conversion Value.The card’s headline figure should match Outbrain’s Total Conversion Value column for the same date range to within 1 to 2 percent. Larger gaps usually trace to one of the reasons below. Why our number may legitimately differ from Outbrain’s report:
| Reason | Direction | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Time zone | Boundary days off | Outbrain UI uses the marketer-account timezone; the card uses UTC. For “today” the gap can shift by a full day. |
| Conversion ingestion lag | Ours lower for “today” / “yesterday” | Outbrain conversions can take 24 to 72 hours to settle; same-day numbers are 50 to 70 percent of the eventual figure. The card refreshes hourly but the vendor data itself is incomplete intraday. |
| Attribution-model change | Either direction | Changes to attribution window or model retroactively re-state revenue in Outbrain’s UI; the card uses whatever Outbrain returns at poll time. |
| Conversion-value re-mapping | Ours overstated if pixel sends inflated value | If the pixel sends total + shipping_subsidy + tax (a misconfigured implementation), revenue overstates the actual order subtotal. Outbrain doesn’t validate the value, the card sums whatever the API returns. |
| Currency conversion | Either if multi-currency | Multi-account merchants with per-region marketer accounts get FX conversion on the Vortex IQ side; Outbrain’s UI shows native currency per account. |
| View-conversion exclusion | Same | Both card and Outbrain UI exclude view-through conversions from primary conversions_value. Toggling Outbrain’s UI to “All conversions” inflates its number; this card uses primary only. |
| Card | Expected relationship | Causes of legitimate divergence |
|---|---|---|
shopify.total_revenue, bigcommerce.total_revenue, adobe_commerce.total_revenue | (Outbrain claimed revenue) ≤ (commerce platform total revenue). Outbrain’s number is a subset of total. | The ratio gives the channel’s claimed contribution; truly incremental contribution is materially smaller (lift studies show 30 to 60 percent of claimed). |
google_analytics.ga_revenue_by_channel | Outbrain UTM-tagged revenue should land here under the configured channel grouping. | UTM-tagging discipline determines visibility; untagged Outbrain traffic appears as Direct/Referral and double-attribution can occur. |
google_ads.gads_conversions_value, facebook.fb_revenue | Each paid channel claims its own attributed revenue. | The sum of all paid-channel attributed revenue typically exceeds commerce-platform revenue because of overlapping attribution windows. Each channel’s claim is “I helped with this much”; only one channel actually got the last touch. |
Known limitations / merchant FAQs
Outbrain says it drove £33k of revenue but my CFO doesn’t see it. Who’s right? Both, partially. Outbrain claims attributed-to-Outbrain revenue under last-click within a 30-day window. The CFO sees commerce-platform total revenue. The £33k is a subset of total revenue; orders where Outbrain was the last paid touch. Truly incremental revenue (orders that wouldn’t have happened without Outbrain) is typically 30 to 60 percent of the claimed figure, the rest would have arrived via other channels in Outbrain’s absence. Lift studies are the rigorous way to size that gap; in their absence, treat Outbrain’s claimed revenue as a directional contribution measure, not a P&L line. Why does today’s revenue look low and yesterday’s keep rising? Conversion ingestion lag. Outbrain’s view-to-purchase tail is 24 to 72 hours; today’s revenue is 50 to 70 percent of the figure that will settle by next morning. Yesterday’s number keeps rising as the lagged conversions arrive. Don’t make spend decisions on partial-day data; use the rolling 7-day for trend. Revenue dropped 25 percent overnight. What’s the playbook? In order of likelihood: (1) Pixel breakage. A code deploy removed the Outbrain conversion tag. Open the order-confirmation page in incognito, view source, look for_obctx. Missing tag is the most common silent cause. (2) Conversion event reconfigured. Someone changed which event fires the conversion (e.g. swapped from “Purchase” to “Begin Checkout”); Outbrain’s audit log shows the change. (3) Attribution window narrowed. Window changes retroactively re-state historical revenue. (4) Genuine creative or audience fatigue. Less common as a sudden drop; usually shows as gradual decline over weeks.
My Outbrain revenue is much smaller than my Meta or Google revenue. Is Outbrain underperforming?
Compare like-for-like at funnel stage, not absolute. Outbrain reaches cold audiences (browsing, not searching); Google branded search reaches hot audiences (typing your brand name). Healthy Outbrain claimed-revenue is 5 to 12 percent of total, healthy Google branded-search claimed-revenue is 20 to 40 percent. The two are not interchangeable.
Should I run a lift study to validate Outbrain’s claimed revenue?
Yes if Outbrain spend is >5 percent of total media budget. The cost is 14 days of “Outbrain off”; the benefit is a defensible incremental-ROAS number you can use for budget decisions. Many merchants lift-test once a year. The result usually places true incremental revenue at 30 to 60 percent of last-click claimed; if the gap is wider, the channel is over-claimed and budget should reduce.
The conversion value the pixel sends, can I change it?
Yes, in Outbrain’s pixel implementation. The standard setup sends value: order_total; some merchants prefer value: order_subtotal_excl_tax or value: order_subtotal_excl_tax_excl_shipping for a more conservative ROAS measurement. The choice is irreversible for historical data; pick the value-key once, document it, and live with the choice. The card cannot detect the difference between value-key choices.
Multi-account aggregation, does this card sum across all my Outbrain marketer accounts?
Yes, when multi-account is configured in Vortex IQ. Each marketer account (typically per-region: GBP / EUR / USD) reports in its own currency; the card converts to a single display currency using the daily ECB rate. To see per-region breakdowns separately, add a Per-Region panel in the Nerve Centre dashboard customisation.
Why don’t view-through conversions count?
Industry-standard conservatism. View-through (someone saw an Outbrain ad but didn’t click, then bought via direct or organic 14 days later) is the easiest claim for a paid channel to inflate; advertising platforms compete to claim the widest possible attribution window. Vortex IQ uses primary-conversions-only (click-attribution within window) as the conservative default. Outbrain provides a separate “view conversions” figure on its dashboard if a merchant wants to see it.
Can I separate revenue by Outbrain campaign type (Engage vs Awareness vs Conversions)?
Yes, via Revenue by Campaign, which tags each campaign with its bidding objective. The headline figure on this card aggregates all three; the per-campaign breakdown is where the channel-mix story lives.
Outbrain’s revenue figure stopped updating overnight. What’s wrong?
Two checks. (1) API token / credentials. If the marketer-account password or API key was rotated without updating Vortex IQ, polling fails silently. Check Settings → Connectors → Outbrain → Test Connection. (2) Account suspension. Outbrain occasionally suspends accounts for compliance review (e.g. a flagged ad creative); during suspension the API still serves historical data but stops updating. The marketer-account UI shows a banner; check there first.