0 Conversions on Taboola or Outbrain? Diagnose Push Traffic (2026)

You signed up at taboola.com or outbrain.com, watched a couple of setup tutorials, and launched your first campaign. The bid looked right, the budget looked right, the funnel was decent. Then you spent $100, $200, $300, and the conversion column still reads zero. Meanwhile your CTR is through the roof. Something is clearly broken, and it is not your offer.

Nine times out of ten, the culprit is push traffic. Your dashboard is filling up with clicks from iOS and Android mobile games, and not a single one of those people has any intention of buying your product. This is the most common reason a beginner account looks busy and earns nothing, and it is fixable once you know what you are looking at.

I'm Marcel Sattler, founder of native-advertising.net. Since 2015 I have spent more than $100M across Taboola, Outbrain, Newsbreak, MGID, Yahoo Native, Mediago, and RevContent for DTC, lead-gen, and affiliate offers, and I have watched countless first campaigns die on this exact problem. The zero-conversion-with-high-CTR pattern is a signature, not a mystery.

Why high CTR and zero conversions points straight at push traffic

A profitable native campaign and a dead one can look almost identical at the top of the funnel. The difference shows up when you put click-through rate next to conversion rate. When you see a very high CTR and almost zero conversions in the same campaign, you are not looking at a bad offer. You are looking at the wrong traffic.

Open the site or placement section of your Taboola or Outbrain report and read the breakdown. If a large share of your spend is coming from app games and smartphone games, that is your answer. Those placements generate enormous CTR because people are tapping to get back to their game, and they generate enormous nothing on the conversion side because nobody on that screen wants your product.

This is the trap that makes people declare native ads dead after losing $300. The clicks are real, the spend is real, the intent is fake. Before you touch your bid, your creative, or your landing page, pull the placement report and check how much of that $100 to $300 went to push.

What push traffic actually is

To diagnose it you have to understand the two funnels that exist on every native platform. The good one is the editorial funnel I practice and teach on YouTube. Someone reads an article on a real news site, scrolls to the bottom, and goes looking for the next thing to read because they have time and genuine curiosity.

Say you sell knee sleeves for knee pain. A reader with knee pain sees your headline, thinks "let me check what doctors recommend," and clicks through to your advertorial. There they learn how the product works, why they need it, a little FOMO, and then they take action and buy. That is the regular funnel, and that is the click you actually want to pay for.

Push traffic is the opposite human. Someone is playing a free mobile game, and free games are not really free. The developer monetizes the player with ads, including ads served through Taboola and Outbrain. To continue the level, the player has to watch a video or tap through an ad unit. You have seen these yourself if you play anything on your phone.

That player might be 19 years old with zero interest in knee sleeves. They tap because they have to in order to keep playing, then they land on your offer page by force, not by choice. There are multiple kinds of push traffic, but the forced-tap mobile-game unit is the big one, and it is the one quietly eating your budget. With enough volume you might scrape one or two accidental conversions, but you cannot build a business on a traffic source where the click means nothing.

The three ways to avoid push traffic on Taboola and Outbrain

Once you have confirmed push is the problem, you have three options to remove it. They are not equal.

1. Do it manually. You go into your placement report, find every push site, and exclude it by hand. I do not recommend this. There is so much push inventory that the work never ends. The minute you exclude 100 push sites, another 200 appear, and you are back in the report excluding again. You are usually only spending a buck or two on each one, so you never build a real placement that you can pour $100 or $200 into and trust. Instead you end up with 200 tiny placements at 70 or 80 cents each, all of which you have to kill manually, and your campaign never gets traction.

1. Use third-party software. Tools like The Optimizer Native run virtual whitelists and blacklists that do the manual exclusion automatically. They watch for tells such as a CTR that is far too high for a legitimate site and cut the placement for you. The catch is technical. You have to set it up yourself, which means you already need to understand how native ads, virtual whitelists, and blacklists work. It is not rocket science, but it is not a one-click install either.

1. Ask your account rep to apply a block list or whitelist. This is the method I recommend, and the one we use at native-advertising.net. A rep on Taboola or Outbrain can apply a block list that strips out almost all of that push and app traffic, or apply a curated whitelist instead. Outbrain, for example, has a performance whitelist of manually vetted publishers the platform already knows convert well. This is the cleanest fix by far, and it leads directly into the problem most beginners do not see coming.

Why method three depends on your monthly budget

Here is the wall. The block-list-and-whitelist method requires an account rep, and a free self-service account does not come with one. When you sign up at taboola.com or outbrain.com on your own, you get a self-service account, which means you are alone. There might be a support chat, but support cannot attach a block list or a whitelist to your account.

So the moment you go live on a self-service account, push traffic starts flowing and you have no clean way to stop it. The exact tool that solves your zero-conversion problem is the one a beginner account cannot access.

Getting a rep comes down to spend. With a budget of $1K or $2K a month, the platforms will not assign you a rep, because they do not have the resources to support every small account and they reserve hands-on help for advertisers using the platform seriously. Once you can spend around $10K per month, you qualify for a rep who will set up your block lists and whitelists and actually support you.

That budget reality is exactly why I tell people not to start with native ads on a tight $1K to $3K monthly budget. At that level, your money is better spent on TikTok, YouTube, or Facebook ads. If you are running a DTC or dropshipping offer, a lead-gen campaign, or affiliate traffic and you do not have the budget for a rep, you will be stuck fighting push by hand or paying for software you have to configure yourself.

The native ads cost curve nobody warns you about

There is one more thing the zero-conversion panic hides, and it is the reason patience matters here. Native advertising is one of the most expensive traffic sources in the world at the very beginning. Your first dollars on Taboola or Outbrain buy you data, push contamination, and a steep learning curve, not profit.

On the long run it flips. Once push is blocked, the placements are clean, and the campaign has scaling room, native becomes one of the cheapest traffic platforms available, with very low CPCs, CPMs, and CPAs at scale. The accounts that win are the ones that survived the expensive opening phase with enough budget to bring a rep in and clean the traffic.

That is the whole arc. Expensive and noisy at the start, cheap and scalable later, with push traffic as the gate between the two. If you bail after $300 because of a zero in the conversion column, you never reach the half where native pays. The $10K-a-month threshold is not a paywall for its own sake; it is roughly the spend it takes to get the support that makes the cheap, scalable half possible.

Watch the full breakdown

Where to go from here

If your Taboola or Outbrain account is showing high CTR and zero conversions, do not blame the offer yet. Pull the placement report, check how much of your spend is going to mobile-game and app traffic, and decide which of the three removal methods fits your budget. If you can spend around $10K a month, a rep with block lists is the fastest path back to green. If you cannot, native may simply be the wrong channel for now.

Want a second set of eyes on your traffic mix before you write off native ads entirely? Book a strategy call and we will audit your account. You can also see how we structure clean, push-free campaigns on Taboola and Outbrain, or review the case studies where blocking push and rebuilding on premium placements turned losing accounts profitable.