Hyros & Tracify for Native Ads: Why They Miss (2026)

A brand comes to us already spending on Taboola and Outbrain, plugs in Hyros or Tracify, and the dashboard tells them native is losing money. The reality? They were profitable the whole time. The tool was just blind to native traffic.

Since the iOS 14 update broke Facebook attribution, every advertiser has gone hunting for a third-party tracking fix. Those tools work fine for Facebook and TikTok. On Taboola and Outbrain they undercount, and that miscount kills campaigns that should be scaling.

Do Hyros and Tracify work for native ads?

Marcel Sattler, founder of native-advertising.net, has run native campaigns since 2015 and deployed over $100M across Taboola, Outbrain, Newsbreak, MGID, Yahoo Native, Mediago, and RevContent. Across dozens of client accounts running these third-party attribution tools, the answer has been consistent: not yet, not for native.

Hyros, Tracify, and the rest were built around Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. They have the KPIs, the integrations, and the volume of Facebook campaigns behind them, so the modeling is tuned for that traffic. Native is a different animal. There is no single dominant native source — Taboola and Outbrain are the two majors, and below them sit a dozen smaller networks like Newsbreak, MGID, Mediago, and RevContent that many of these tools don't even integrate with directly.

Where a direct integration does exist, the tracking still falls apart. That is the part brands don't expect, and it is the part that costs them money. A tool that has wired up the Taboola or Outbrain API still doesn't understand native click behavior, so the integration exists on paper but the numbers it returns are off.

Why iOS 14 made this everyone's problem

Before the iOS 14 update, most small and mid-size brands never thought hard about tracking. Facebook reported a number, they trusted it, they scaled. The update broke that reporting, and suddenly every advertiser running Facebook and Google was face to face with attribution gaps for the first time.

That is the moment Hyros, Tracify, and a wave of similar tools entered the market — three of the most visible, but far from the only ones. They exist to patch the hole iOS 14 punched in Facebook attribution, and for that job they are genuinely smart pieces of software.

The trouble is that brands then assume one tool covers every channel. They sign up to fix Facebook, see it work on Facebook, and bolt native onto the same dashboard expecting the same result. That assumption is where the money leaks. As of early 2023 there was no legitimate native solution inside these tools, and the core gap still trips up brands in 2026.

What we actually tested

Marcel didn't take this on faith. The agency built standalone shops — sites created purely for native traffic — and ran 100% native to them so the math would be clean.

With one source, the calculation is trivial: take the spend on Taboola or Outbrain, take the sales, divide, and you have your CPA. There is no Facebook traffic muddying the attribution. Anything the third-party tool reports should match that simple division.

It didn't. The tools handed back numbers that were materially worse than the real, statistically verifiable result. Not off by a rounding error — wrong enough to make a winning campaign look like a loser. When the only traffic hitting a shop is Taboola, and the tool still reports a CPA far above the spend-divided-by-sales truth, the problem is the tool, not the campaign.

Clients ran the same test on their Facebook traffic in parallel, and there the tools landed in the right range. Same tool, same account, two traffic sources, two completely different levels of accuracy. The pattern held across multiple products, multiple campaigns, multiple countries, and every tool tested. This isn't an attack on any one platform — we have friends across most of them — it is a measurement problem specific to native.

The "one dashboard" dream doesn't survive native

The pitch for Hyros or Tracify is a single source of truth: every channel, one screen. For a Facebook-and-TikTok brand, that mostly delivers.

Add native into that same dashboard and the picture breaks. The native rows undercount, so you either trust bad numbers and pause profitable campaigns, or you stop trusting the dashboard entirely. Neither is a single source of truth.

The honest conclusion: you cannot run everything through one screen today. Native traffic needs to be measured somewhere else. It's a compromise nobody wants to hear, but pretending otherwise is how brands turn off campaigns that were making money. If you run ecommerce or dropshipping on Taboola, that one blind dashboard can mean killing your best-performing product because the screen says it lost money when it didn't.

What actually works: run a real tracker

Marcel is not interested in only naming what's broken. The fix is a dedicated campaign tracker. The agency runs several; one of the mains is Voluum. RedTrack does the same job. The specific brand doesn't matter — running one does.

If you run native, a tracker is not optional. Here is why it earns its place before you even look at attribution accuracy:

• You can swap landers and switch offers without changing the campaign URL, so the campaign never re-enters review when you change something behind it. On Taboola and Outbrain, re-review can stall a live campaign for hours or days, so a stable tracker URL protects your momentum.
• Suspicious click detection flags junk traffic before it wrecks your data.
• You see which advertorials drive conversions, which offer pages convert best, and which devices, carriers, and operating systems perform.
• You get day-parting and far deeper analysis than the native dashboards on Taboola or Outbrain expose directly.

With the tracker in place, we recover nearly every conversion and can optimize at a granularity the platform dashboards never show. The trade-off: that data lives in the tracker, and you can't push it back into a third-party tool like Hyros. So native gets measured in its own clean environment, which — given the accuracy gap — is exactly where you want it.

What a tracker shows that Taboola and Outbrain don't

The accuracy fix is only half the reason to run a tracker. The other half is the depth of data you get for optimization, which the native dashboards simply do not expose.

Inside the tracker you can see exactly which advertorial drives each conversion, which offer page converts best behind that advertorial, and how performance splits by device, carrier, and operating system. That is the level you optimize at when you're scaling — not the campaign-level averages Taboola and Outbrain hand you.

Layer day-parting on top and you control when budget spends down to the hour, instead of letting the platform smear it across a full day. Pair that with suspicious click detection and you're cutting junk traffic out of the data before it distorts a single decision. For lead-gen and affiliate advertisers especially, that granularity is the difference between guessing and knowing.

The three rules for tracking native in 2026

If you take nothing else from Marcel's breakdown, take these three.

1. Expect tracking differences at scale. The moment you run real budget across multiple sources, no tool tracks 100%. A gap of a few percent is normal and fine. Chasing a perfect one-to-one match across Taboola, Outbrain, and a third analytics tool is a fight you can't win — even Google Analytics, the platform dashboard, and your tracker will disagree, and that has been true for as long as we've run larger campaigns.
2. If your only dashboard is a Facebook-era attribution tool, accept that it will not measure native precisely. These platforms are working on it, but as Marcel flagged at the start of 2023, there was no legit native solution then — and the core gap still trips up brands today. Don't pause native campaigns based on numbers from a tool that can't see them.
3. If you run native yourself, run a tracker like Voluum or an equivalent to squeeze out maximum performance — or work with an agency that hands you that stack already configured.

Watch the full breakdown

Is your native account tracked correctly?

If you're running Taboola or Outbrain through a Facebook attribution tool, there's a real chance your reporting is undercounting and you're throttling campaigns that are actually profitable. The fix is a proper tracker layer built for native, feeding clean conversion, advertorial, and device data you can optimize against.

We set up and run that stack for clients at no extra cost, whether you're in ecommerce and dropshipping, lead-gen, or affiliate. Book a strategy call and we'll audit how your native traffic is being measured. You can also see the numbers in our case studies or browse the full resource library for more native breakdowns across Taboola and Outbrain.