Advertising is a necessary tool for brands to sustain themselves in the market and remain in business. But how much attention do you pay to the paid ads, and do you not feel irritated sometimes with the paid ads?
We all have been so much accustomed to and resistant to the traditional and paid advertising that we just ignore those because they stand apart from the content and make us feel irritated. This is why traditional advertising and online advertising have become less effective and becoming more less effective as the days are passing.
What to do now if the advertising is necessary and we’re not getting expected results from traditional and digital advertising?
It’s the place where native advertising enters the game. Many have already adopted and more are adopting this form of advertising because of its assimilation with the content without making consumers annoyed with the ad formats.
Let’s get to know more about this new form of advertising!
What is Native Advertising?
Native advertising is also the form of paid advertising, but the ad experience naturally fits with the user experience i.e. look, feel, and function of the media format where they publish. It makes the creative ads format so much more cohesive with page content and design and maintains consistency on the publishing platforms without disrupting the platform behavior. Because of this type of nature consumers feel like the sponsored content belongs to the publishing platforms.
In native advertising, one type of paid content is enough as it can assimilate with any type of platform whether it’s a social media, website, suggested article, or promoted search results. Native ads can change their ad experience according to the user experience of the platforms and appear as if they’re part of the content on the platform itself.
Native advertising in simple words can be depicted as, “When in Rome, do as the Romans do”.
It means natively changing the behavior of the ad format according to the publishing platforms. The same content can be used as social media posts such as Twitter, FB, and Insta posts, and it can also be used in the search engine search results such as on Google’s SERPs.
As the paid content is fitting “Natively” in every single publishing platform, this is why it’s called Native Advertising.
Now, let’s see the different types of native ad formats!
What are Native Ad Formats?
Advertising and technology both are evolving and becoming more sophisticated day by day. Because of the evolution of digital platforms and technology, it’s easier to have complete control over native advertising, and with just a single click of the mouse, we can the style and format of any native ads.
Some of the popular and successful Native Ad Formats are;
- Carousel Ads
- In Feed Sponsored Content such as Story, the middle of the content
- Sponsored Social Native Ads such as Insta, Twitter, FB, LinkedIn
- Sponsored Search Engine Native Ads such as Google, Bing SERP’s
- Video Native Ads
- Mobile App Installs
- Suggested Content Native Ads
- Native Ads on Publishers’ Homepage
Promoted search results, sponsored posts, suggested content and sponsored social media posts are examples of native advertising. You can choose according to your brand which native ad is going to perform well for your brand.
There have been new terms introduced in the advertising that is programmatic native advertising, so let’s differentiate the terms native advertising and programmatic native advertising!
What is the difference between Native Advertising and Programmatic Native Advertising?
Native advertising creates and places the ads immersive to the target publishing platforms such as web or social media pages. Native advertising works on PPC (Pay-Per-Click) and content placement strategy models.
Programmatic Native Advertising is the form of advertising in which native ads are programmatically bought and placed to offer brands the ability to make the ads more relevant and personalized according to the publishing platforms to provide a more immersive and cohesive user experience.
Native ads are created from metadata such as URLs, Headlines, Thumbnails, and Descriptions. But programmatic native advertising lets you target specific target audiences in real-time. You can optimize your ad spending and ROI by auctioning with real-time bidding.
There’re two platforms in programmatic advertising that make it possible; SSP and DSP.
Whenever any user visits a publishing platform the supply side platform (SSP) sends bid requests. After getting a bid request from SSP, the demand side platform (DSP) bids for the ad on behalf of the advertiser. Then again SSP selects the winning bid and after configuring the native ad, places it on their publishing platform using their template for the websites or applications.
All this happens to target specific audiences in programmatic advertising and make native advertising more natural, cohesive, and immersive according to the target publishing platforms.
We’ve seen the difference between native advertising and programmatic native advertising, now let’s see the most popular native advertising channels;
What are Native Advertising Channels?
Native advertising can be seen on all digital platforms and it’s become an important part of Digital Marketing. Native advertising channels can be categorized in the following aspects;
Search Engines
There are a lot of search engines but google and bing are the most preferred search engines worldwide. If you can want to run a native advertising campaign then first start with google as it is the largest search engine in the world in the terms of queries per day searched on a particular search engine so far. They have adopted native advertising to show their sponsored post content.
Whenever you search about the queries, you can find first one or two results are from native paid advertising.
Social
Social media channels are rocking nowadays. In the terms of users, social media like FB, Insta, Twitter, and Snapchat have the largest consumer base. They’ve also adopted native advertising and provided the features to display ad campaigns in feeds such as stories and in several ad formats such as carousel, and creatives.
Open Web
On the web platforms, you can post your advertisements anywhere you want, you just need permission from the publishing platforms. You can even post your advertisements on the homepage of other business websites if you’ve partnered with them. You just need to go out in the market and search for some popular publishing and content recommendation platforms.
If you’re just a beginner in native advertising campaigns, then I would suggest you go first with Social and search engines, once you’ve successfully run the campaigns across these platforms, you can go for the open web. Rest it depends on you with what you want to go first!
We’ve seen the native advertising channels, now let’s discuss the best way of choosing the right native advertising platform for your campaign.
How to choose the right native advertising platform for your brand?
Choosing the right native advertising platform can be tough for you if you’re just starting out in this field of advertising. But, here we’re providing some basic traits that need to be considered in the platform before start publishing the advertisements on it. In order to optimize the ad campaign and maximize the ROI, audience engagement, and content distribution, look at the following properties of the publishing platform;
- Auctioning Models Transparency
- Target Audiences on the Networks
- Bidding Models such as CPA, Target CPA, Manual CPC, Enhanced CPC, CPM, or CPV
- Compatibility with the Software and Hardware
- Native Ad Formats on the Publishing Platforms such as In Feed Units, Promoted Listings, Paid Search Ads, Content Recommendation Widgets,
- Pricing such as the minimum required balance to spend per day if we want to run the campaigns.
- Quality of the Network and Its Website and Webpages
- The scale of the Platform
- Service Types such as self-service and tech support
- Targeting & Retargeting Capabilities
- Tracking of the KPIs (Key Performance Metrics)
- Reporting of KPIs
These are the main characteristics you need to compare before going out with a particular platform for publishing native advertising campaigns. Even after filtering with these characteristics, just don’t be stuck with only one platform, try out other platforms as well only that way you’ll get to know which publishing platforms are best suitable for your products and services.
Now, after choosing the publishing platforms you need to run the campaigns, so let’s discuss the most suitable way of running a successful native advertising campaign;
How to Run a Successful Native Advertising Campaign?
Native advertising is the way of reaching out to target audiences and engaging with them by publishing a high-quality compelling campaign on high-quality websites that already have a larger consumer base of your target audiences on their publishing platforms.
Any campaign is said to be successful when you’ve defined the goal before starting the campaign and achieved it through the campaign, so define your goals beforehand and what you want from a particular campaign. Your goal can be anything such as buying a product, Maximizing the downloads on an E-Book, Getting people enrolled for the demo of products and services, and letting them watch a story of your consumers or other brand-related stories.
The steps of running a successful campaign are;
- Define Your Niche
- Define Your Target Audiences
- Find out the best publishing platform according to the above-mentioned basic characteristics
- Develop Unique and High-Quality Content for your target audience
- Publish the content on the chosen platforms’ webpages such as landing pages, blogs, and stories.
- Target high potential consumers on the platforms
- Execute the Campaign
- Track the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
- Build reports
- Measure the results
- Optimize the campaign, and repeat the process again for your next campaign
If you follow these above-mentioned steps, you’ll be able to build and run a successful native advertising campaign with no extra effort and have peace of mind with you.
Now, let’s discuss the benefits you’re going to get by running a successful campaign;
Benefits of Native Advertising Campaign
There are a lot of benefits you can get from running a successful native advertising campaign for your brand. Focus on building high-quality attention-grabbing and engaging content including powerful headlines, creatives, and content.
Some of the benefits are;
- Advertisers can reach their target audiences when users are completely open to discovering something new
- Fights Ad Fatigue and Annoyance
- Increase in Purchase Intent
- More effective than any other formats
- Publishers can monetize their websites without sacrificing UX (user experience)
- Show Relevant Ads to the Content on the Publishing Platform
- Users feel like they’ve complete control over the content they’re reading
- Users can avoid the disruption created by other forms of advertising such as displays and banners.
- Increased user engagement with the advertisements
- Increment in the leads and conversion rates
- Increased and Improved ROI
The native form of advertising keeps every aspect in consideration and works for everyone, everyone gets what they want. Consumers get the content they are willing to discover, advertisers get new consumers, and publishers can monetize their websites without sacrificing their user experience and third-party integrations.
Let’s see have a look at some of the examples of native advertising;
Examples of Native Advertising
We’ve already discussed some of the examples of native advertising earlier in this blog. Let’s make a nutshell of all of the examples of native advertising;
- Sponsored Posts on News and other Websites
- Suggested Sponsored Content below the articles on publishing platforms
- Sponsored Webpages on Search Engines
- Sponsored Ads on social media platforms such as Twitter, FB, & insta
- Promoted content assimilated on websites
Any form of advertising that can assimilate with the publishing platforms is the form of native advertising.
We’ve also seen the different types of examples of native advertising that you can use for your brand.
If you’re a WordPress user that these native advertising plugins can be so much helpful for you;
- Google AdSense with Matched Content
- Ad Inserter
- Google Ad Manager
- Quick AdSense
- Insert Post Ads
The aforementioned tools can be so much beneficial for you if you’re using a WordPress content management system for your brand website. If you’re just starting out in the digital world, then you can connect with our team for a professionally developed website for your brand. DigiAvtar is a well-known digital marketing agency in Gurugram, India working for the exponential growth of its clients.
As we’ve included everything in this blog, so let’s conclude it here;
Takeaways
When your advertisements at sidebars, popups, advertising sections of magazines, videos ads, and social and search ads are not working fine then you need to take one step further and enter the world of Native Advertising.
It can help you in driving traffic, engagement, and conversions across your marketing platforms. Furthermore, the user experience of the publishing platform remains intact with native advertising. Consumers engage with the native ads even though they know they’re looking at an ad because the content in native ads is relevant and valuable for them.
So, are you going to use it for your brand?
If your answer is “YES” then do let us know in the comment section how’re you going to use it.
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