11 min read
What Are Native Ads And How Do I Use Them?
Advertising has always been a constant struggle between advertisers and readers. The advertiser wants to get as many responses as possible, but they have to do it in a way that doesn’t annoy the reader. However, the Internet provided readers with tools that allowed them to block certain advertisements. Hence, advertisers had to get a lot more crafty in presenting ads without having them be rejected. You might be asking yourself about how to native advertising? Before you can get that answer, you need to understand the landscape and know why things are the way they are today.
The Advertising Marketplace
One of the many goals that advertisers have is to make their ads blend in with content as much as possible. This has been the case for the last 100 years when advertisers would try to make advertisements seem like newspaper content. This did not change when we moved to digital platforms. The reason for this is that people will try to reject obvious advertisements without even giving it a second thought.
Statistically, advertising works best when people think it is content and not an ad. For the first few decades of online advertising, advertisers have always tried new and innovative ways to make their content and ads look similar. However, the majority of the time, they only had banner ads, and those were successful in a significant portion of cases. Still, they started wearing people out as they became more prevalent. Eventually, ad blockers were created, and millions of people suddenly found that they could eliminate ads on websites.
Advertising has taken a beating in recent years because of these factors. People don’t click on banner ads as much as they used to, and it is almost impossible to get good money to support our website on advertising alone. This is a huge part of the reason why native is starting to dominate the advertising industry. It is a lot easier for you to implement native on your website, and you also have the benefit of having everything blend in almost perfectly. Here is an example of a native ad, you can see that it looks like content but Bumble sponsored it so throughout the article you will see references to Bumble:
(Image Credit: Acquisio)
Why Native Advertising Came to Be
As mentioned above, native web ads came to be when advertisers saw how important it was to make content and advertising look like one. A native campaign is going to perform a lot better than traditional banner ads and other types of web advertising. It is going to improve revenues for the publisher and the advertiser. The majority of display advertising in today’s marketplace is native. In today’s world, publishers need to make more money to keep their websites afloat, and the way to do that is with advertising. Native is an essential part of the process because it has a lot higher ad spend than other types and will be the most viable option in the future. However, one thing you need to know is that native suffer from some drawbacks. The majority of these drawbacks are ethical in nature, and you have to decide if it is worth it for your business.
Why the Controversy?
This type of advertising is not without its detractors. Many people condemn it, and it is one of the most scrutinized forms of advertising by the FCC and other regulatory agencies. The obvious reason why it is so scrutinized is that it is imperceptible to the average person. It is very difficult to know what is content and advertising when we use native. You might have a lot of complaints if you don’t label your native portion accurately, and you might even get a letter from the FCC. This type of advertising is the most common on most social media websites, and it is also gaining in popularity on blogs. There is a considerable chance that people will complain to you, depending on how you implement native on your website or blog. You should maintain strict labeling on all advertisements so people know what they are looking at. There shouldn’t be a chance that they don’t know when they see an ad.
Do People Recognize Native Ads?
The biggest survey done about native is that about half of people recognize it as advertising. However, the main thing you need to remember is that they preferred this advertising method to others. It blends in extremely well with your content, and it will help drive click-through rates. You also get the opportunity to make your native spot on your page a lot more informative. This means your advertising will be a lot better for people reading. You can also include audio and video advertisements, depending on the page you are trying to advertise. This ability to include a lot of other multimedia is one of the biggest advantages that this type of advertising has.
There are so many different types of native ads that you will have an easy time integrating them into whatever content you have. This is why this way of advertising will be the future of Internet advertising. It just makes everything a lot better for the publisher and the reader. It could potentially save a lot of websites that rely on advertising revenue to run successfully.
Types of Native Web Ads
These six options are sure to give every website owner a smile. You have something for every part of your website. It will increase your conversion rate, and you won’t even have to do a lot of work integrating them into your website.
- In-Feed Ad – Depending on your content management system, you might have a feed of articles and other content you want to display. This type of advertising layout makes it easy for you to integrate native content into your normal workflow. You can even customize them to look and feel exactly like your normal content would. For example:
(Image Credit: StackAdapt)
- Search Feed Ad – Search is one of the most neglected aspects of most websites. However, you can integrate native into this part of your website and get more revenue when people search for content. You can customize your ads to look exactly like search results on your website. It gives you another place to put up advertising that won’t interfere with site usability. Here are a few examples of search feed ads:
- Recommendation Ad – The sidebar is a great place to put recommended content. A big thing that most publishers are doing now is to put native content there as well. They can tweak the native content to match the look and feel of their site. You can do the same to add even more content to your website. This will have a big benefit to your search engine optimization efforts. The image below shows a recommended tab:
(Image Credit: StackAdapt)
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- Promotions on Content – If you are selling something, you can add native content on that page to sell even more. This is especially useful for publishers that have an e-commerce website. For instance:
(Image Credit: Business Linkedin)
- Native Next to a Picture – You can use native content next to the pictures you have on your website. You can put native in the form of pictures that blend in with the already existing content. It will make your website a lot more appealing, and you will get extra revenue from having those images. Below is an example:
(Image Credit: Business Linkedin)
- Create Your Own – The beautiful thing about native advertising is that there are millions of ways to customize them to match the look and feel of your website. You can always find more options to test and tweak to get the best click to rates and revenues. The image below shows a custom native ad by Monster energy drinks and Halo Infinity. They teamed up to make a snapchat filter people can use and send to their friends. This is a great example of a custom native advertising campaign.
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Why Marketers Use Native Ads
The main reason marketers seem to love this way of advertising is that it gives them a lot of extra benefits. People are now trained to ignore banner ads and other traditional forms of advertising. That means you won’t be reaching a wide audience if you stick to those methods. The new way is to integrate that advertising right into the content. The majority of people won’t know the difference, so you will be able to create persuasive advertising content that gets more results. You also are able to have SEO benefits without having to create extra content.
There is almost no downside to doing advertising this way, so it will continue to grow in popularity. The majority of studies also show that this type of advertising generates more revenue without changing anything else.
How to Leverage Native Advertising
The six methods mentioned above are going to be the easiest way for you to leverage this type of advertising on your website. However, there is a multi-step process you need to go through before you can get started. The first thing you will want to know is whether to have your own ad server or integrate your website into a wider network. There are many native networks that are similar to Google AdSense. These networks allow you to place code on your website and turn it into a money making machine. However, the main drawback of using this method is that you won’t have total control over how your website displays these ads. You also won’t be able to choose exactly which ads are placed on your website. It could be a major problem for business owners that want more control.
For the business owners that want more control, there are custom options that you can use to totally control what native content gets placed on your website. You also have the option of choosing your own, which is a major benefit if you have multiple sites that you want to use to help each other.
Analyzing Your Content to See Where They Fit
This step works well, no matter if you are a publisher or an advertiser yourself. When you are acting in the role of an advertiser, it is your duty to inspect the places you place native content on to make sure that they fit perfectly. You can also tweak and change your content slightly to improve the way it blends in. Native is all about blending in, so the better job you can do, the better your results will be.
When it comes to analyzing content to put on your own website, you want to do the same thing you would do as an advertiser. That means finding the best placements and optimizing each of them for the best results. The best place is usually in the content area, so it will improve your search engine results. The extra content will make your page seem longer to Google and other search engines, and they have valued that more in recent algorithm updates. The biggest thing you could do for your business is to spend a lot of time and effort optimizing potential placements for your native campaign.
Creating a Native Campaign
In this part of your how-to native advertising guide, you will learn how to set up your own campaign to start. Native campaigns will be the future of advertising, so it makes a lot of sense for you to understand how to do it and see the entire landscape. You want to know the big players in this industry, so you know where to go, depending on what your needs are. The major player in this industry is called Outbrain. They produce everything from the ad server to the marketplace, where you can place your own ads on other websites. They make it quite easy to become your own publisher.
If you would rather stay out of a network and have campaigns, you can use an ad server like Adzerk to create your own. The major thing to know is that these solutions are going to be your only ones in this industry. While it is growing fast, it is still a small industry, and there are not many players currently vying for control. The old world of advertising is still big enough to control a large portion of advertising revenues and mind share. The image below shows some advertisements that Adzerk did:
(Image Credit: Adzerk)
Measuring Your Results from Native
Another consideration is how you will measure your results in this field. Before you ask what are native ads, you need to start thinking about analytics and how to make it work for you in your campaigns. The first thing you need to do is to focus on getting an ad server, as it usually has analytics built-in. However, for a custom solution like mentioned above, you will need to find a solution for yourself that includes analytics. You might need to hire programmers to include these analytical features, such as click tracking, demographics, and other things you need to create an intelligent system.
Programmatic Ad Buying
This is something you only need to think about if you are going the custom route. Since Outbrain includes all of this functionality, you only need to worry about this when you want to do it yourself. Outbrain will include its own programmatic ad buying network. This is where software algorithms will intelligently choose where to put advertisements. As these algorithms improve, it becomes a lot better at choosing placements than a human would. It also makes the process quick and easy.
However, you might need to implement this for your website if you are going the custom route. This means hiring programmers who know about artificial intelligence and machine learning. It might also be expensive for you since this knowledge is not widespread. It is going to be difficult to find a programmer who knows both advertising and artificial intelligence.
We hope that you found this article useful.
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Diib®: Native Ads are the Future of the Industry
This way of advertising is the future. Blending content and advertising will make things better for everyone. That means this industry will continue to grow at a steady pace, as more publishers adopt this way of advertising, and there is more money being poured into developing tools for it. We will also see more resources being poured in as the networks expand.
Many types of marketers now realize how important it is to focus on this method. You can see great examples of native in action on Facebook, Instagram, and other major social media websites. They are the big players when implementing these features, so you can look to them to see where the industry will go in the future. It will help your business considerably if you can also adopt what they are doing too.
Diib Digital offers a User Dashboard with built-in features designed to give you minute-by-minute statistics on your ad campaigns. Here are some of the features that we’re sure you’ll love:
- Customized Objectives give you simple tasks designed to optimize your website and ads
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- Broken pages where you have backlinks (404 checker)
- Keyword, backlink, and indexing monitoring and tracking tools
- Click-through-rates, including your Native Ads
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FAQ’s
When you use paid ads that blend in to your content or look and feel of your website it is native advertising. You can usually find native ads on social media feeds or on the recommended tab on the website you are on. The purpose of native ads is to not look like ads at all.
Native advertising can be anything from articles to videos and anything else you can think of that a content creator can produce. To make it a native ad a corporation has to buy it and a publishing platform has to promote it. Native ads are paid advertisements.
Consumers across the world agree that native ads are more compelling than display ads. Native ads have an 18% increase in purchase intent compared to display banner ads. 25% more users notice seeing in-feed native ads more than display banner ads. Finally, 53% of users are compelled to look more frequently at native ads.
Readers are much happier when they find out you provide valuable information for free rather than pushing a product you are trying to sell. Tell the reader who you are and what you are about without making it a sales pitch.
Embedded marketing or product placement is a forerunner to native advertising. Native advertising is advertising that appears as the same form as the website or platform it is on. In other words it blends in to the website without looking like an ad.
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