Avoid Push Traffic on Taboola & Outbrain to Boost Earnings (2026)

Most people who launch their first Taboola or Outbrain campaign get crushed by the same thing: garbage traffic that never converts. They sign up, push live, and within a day they are buying thousands of clicks from placements that have zero intent behind them. The campaign bleeds, the dashboard looks busy, and the conclusion they draw is "native ads don't work."

Native ads work. Push traffic doesn't. Those are two different statements, and confusing them is the most expensive mistake new advertisers make. One account I'll break down below was serving roughly 18,000 push impressions against fewer than 1,000 premium impressions before we touched it. That ratio alone explains why it was losing money.

I'm Marcel Sattler, founder of native-advertising.net, and since 2015 I've deployed over $100M across Taboola, Outbrain, Newsbreak, MGID, Yahoo Native, Mediago, and RevContent for DTC, lead-gen, and affiliate offers. The single most common reason a beginner account stays in the red has nothing to do with the offer or the creative. It's the traffic mix.

What is push traffic on Taboola and Outbrain?

Native advertising gives you two fundamentally different qualities of traffic: premium and push. Premium is the placement everyone pictures when they imagine native ads, real publishers like MSN, where someone finishes a news article, scrolls to the bottom, and clicks a recommended headline because the image or hook grabbed them. That's the moment of next: an active click driven by genuine interest.

Push traffic is the opposite. Picture downloading a free game from the App Store or Play Store. You play for three or four minutes, finish a level, and an ad pops up with an overlay sitting on the close button. You can't close it cleanly, so you click, and you land on a separate push traffic page where you have to wait or tap again to get back to your game.

That click had nothing to do with your product. The person is on a mobile device, mid-game, with exactly zero intention to buy or to sign up as a lead. They aren't reading a headline and choosing to learn more. They tapped by accident because they wanted to keep playing.

This applies across every native source, not just one platform. Whether you're on Taboola, Outbrain, MGID, or RevContent, the premium-versus-push distinction is general knowledge that holds everywhere. The mechanics differ slightly per network, but the trap is identical.

Why push traffic kills your conversions

Push is cheap. That's the bait. The CPCs and CPMs look attractive next to premium, where you face more competition and pay more per click. But in nearly a decade of running native at scale, I know almost no legitimate offer that performs on push traffic. Not a few that struggle, almost none that work at all.

The reason is intent. A premium click comes from someone who actively chose to engage because your headline or image caught them. A push click comes from someone fighting an overlay to get back to a mobile game. Same click in your dashboard, completely different human behind it.

And push is rarely cheap enough to compensate. People assume the rock-bottom CPC makes the math work, that volume at a low price beats quality at a high price. It almost never does. The conversion rate is so poor that even at a fraction of the premium CPC, you're still paying more per conversion, if you get any at all.

If you're running a DTC or dropshipping offer, push will quietly drain the budget that should be funding your premium placements. The same is true for lead-gen and affiliate campaigns, where a registration or sale requires real attention that a mid-game accidental tap will never deliver.

The 18,000-to-1,000 ratio: a real account breakdown

Here's what an unhealthy mix actually looks like. On one account I reviewed before taking it over, the premium placements like MSN were serving fewer than 1,000 impressions. The push placements were serving around 18,000.

Read that again. The good, brand-safe, high-intent placements that advertisers actually want were buried, while junk placements were eating roughly 18 times the volume. The relationship between premium and push impressions was completely upside down.

That's not a tuning problem you fix by raising a bid. It's a structural one. Left alone, native traffic flows toward the cheapest, highest-volume inventory, which is exactly the push junk you don't want. Without a block list or a positive list in place, the negative impressions dominate every single time. You will always get more of the garbage than the premium unless you actively stop it.

When an account is sitting at an 18:1 push-to-premium ratio, the campaign is structurally guaranteed to lose. No creative, no offer, no bid adjustment overcomes a traffic mix that lopsided.

How to spot push placements in your reports

Identifying push takes a little experience, but there are tells you can learn fast. Pull your placement report and scan the publisher names.

• Wacky, off-brand placement names that don't map to any real publisher are almost always push. If it looks like a random app or a made-up word, treat it as push.
• Names that obviously aren't big brands, things like "Playtopia" and similar, are push placements.
• Some networks literally label it. If the report says "push" next to a placement, you have your answer.
• Premium placements stand out by contrast, real publishers like MSN, which is a strong, high-volume placement that brands actively want to run on.

The complication is that your traffic is mixed. The same account pulling 18,000 push impressions was also touching MSN. Premium and push arrive together in the same campaign, so you can't just judge the account as "good" or "bad" overall. You have to go placement by placement and separate the two.

Block push from your very first campaign

My recommendation is simple and I apply it from day one on every account: always run on premium traffic, never on push, and avoid push from the very first campaign. Don't launch wide and clean up later. Start clean and build from a solid base you can actually optimize.

This is where the two-part requirement comes in. You need the know-how, knowing premium from push, reading placement reports, building the right lists. But know-how alone isn't enough. You also need the correct technical setup, and without it, getting into the green is almost impossible.

The catch with a self-service signup is real. You can register at taboola.com today and go live within minutes, but you'll get push traffic automatically, and you need a personal rep from the platform to block it properly. The default state of a fresh self-service account is the exact wrong configuration. That gap, between what a beginner can set up alone and what's required to actually filter traffic, is why so many first campaigns never reach profitability.

Once push is blocked and you're running a positive list of premium placements, you finally have a stable foundation. From there, optimization, headline testing, image testing, bid management, actually moves the needle, because every dollar is going toward traffic with real intent.

Watch the full breakdown

Is your account a fit for the same play?

If your Taboola or Outbrain account is mixed and you don't have a rep blocking push, you are almost certainly funding the same 18:1 junk ratio I described, and no amount of creative testing will fix it until the traffic is clean. The fastest win available to most beginner accounts isn't a better hook. It's cutting push and rebuilding on premium placements.

If you want that done correctly, with both the know-how and the technical setup that self-service accounts can't reach on their own, book a strategy call and we'll audit your current mix. You can also see how we've built profitable accounts on Taboola and Outbrain, or review the case studies where premium-only structures turned losing accounts around.