Publishers and brands spend a lot of money trying to draw audiences from other sites and services, whether through social awareness-raising or through marketing efforts. But what audiences do on your site depends very much on where they came from, says an exec from a content discovery engine.

“Referral-based information can have a really big impact on what users do on their site,” Taboola’s sales and operations SVP Ira Silberstein tells Beet.TV. “A user from Weather or Time or search or Facebook will all have different experiences on the destination site in terms of click-through patterns (or) how long they stay on the site.”

Using Taboola, news publishers give readers a bunch of links to interesting further stories, based on their browsing habits. Taboola’s Newsroom product also helps publishers increase effectiveness using A/B testing for headlines and story placement.

“Buying traffic is core to marketing,” Silberstein adds. “I don’t think it’s a four-letter word. They not only create their narrative but control where that narrative appears.”

He joined Taboola in 2011 from the The New York Times where he was VP for Product Development.

Silberstein was a panelist at the Beet.TV Content Marketing Summit, sponsored by Taboola, held at the New York offices of Mindshare this week. You can find more videos from that event here.