Native advertising has generated a lot of buzz. Traditional advertising still plays a significant role in the media environment, but non-disruptive marketing strategies are becoming more and more common, particularly when it comes to engaging and reaching a large audience.
Native advertising is a rapidly expanding market. The value of the worldwide native advertising business is expected to reach $400 billion by 2025, up 372% from 2020, according to a frequently referenced AdYouLike research. Compared to traditional marketing, these advertisements encourage consumers to discover more about brands.
It is important to weigh the advantages and disadvantages of native advertising, whether you are a marketer who is new to native ads or a blogger who wants to earn money while utilizing this powerful marketing tool.
Ok, so is native advertising effective? It is, as evidenced by several data and examples of native advertising. Native advertisements outperform conventional display ads in terms of CTR by 8.8 times and purchase intent by 18%.
However, native advertising has both benefits and challenges. Here, we discuss the advantages and disadvantages of this tactic and offer advice on how to make native advertising effective for your company.
Over the past decade, native advertising has weaved its way into every type of consumable content, emerging as one of the most popular forms of advertising. Here are a few quick facts to bear in mind when it comes to native advertising:
- Native advertising resonates with the audience without coming across as intrusive. It combines advertising with great content, thus creating a seamless experience.
- The term ‘native’ is used because these ads are supposed to mimic the appearance of the usual content on the platform they are on. This prevents them from looking like an ad at first glance.
- Native advertising, when done well, neither feels disruptive nor is deceptive.
- Many brands fail at native advertising by making dishonest attempts to trick readers into clicking on a paid ad.
- Native ads can appear as in-feed ads, paid search ads, content-recommendation widgets, promoted listings, and in-ad with native element units (IAB standard).
The Benefits of Native Advertising
It’s easy to compile the advantages of native advertising. There are many benefits to using this strategy for building awareness, engagement, and revenue.
- Grab Your Audience’s Attention
It’s easier to build brand awareness with native advertising than traditional display ads. According to Acquisio, native ads receive 53% more views than their traditional counterparts. Why? Because they’re more seamlessly integrated into the customer experience. They blend into the content that surrounds them instead of jumping out at readers and saying, This is an ad! Look at me!
- Drive Better Campaign Performance
The effectiveness of native ads can’t be overstated. These ads just perform better overall when compared with many other ad formats — helping advertisers drive conversions and revenue. In fact, 71% of consumers say they personally identify with brands that launch native ads. Only 50% of consumers say the same about display ads.
- Optimize Targeting Capabilities
Native ads can be contextually targeted toward specific audience segments, so advertisers know they have the greatest chance at generating engagement from their impressions.
Consider native ads on publisher sites, for instance. A makeup retailer can launch an article or video ad on a fashion-news site, targeting people who’ve already consumed an article about makeup and are interested in content and products in this category. Or, an athletic-wear brand can distribute native ads on a sports publisher site, reaching readers who’ve expressed interest in learning about fitness gear. The advertiser drives traffic and customers enjoy seamless, personalized ad experiences.
- Build Trust Among Your Customers
Trust is critical in digital advertising, with frequent scandals around data breaches, fake news, and corporate corruption. According to a recent report from Ford, 77% of US consumers find it difficult to trust companies.
Read Also: What is Native Advertising?
That’s why native advertising is so important. It helps brands build trust among their audiences and share valuable content, without resorting to annoying pop-ups or intrusive messages. As Adweek reported, two out of three Gen X and Z consumers trust branded content more than traditional ads.
- Increase Clickthrough Rates
Here’s another statistic in the battle of native ads vs. display ads: native ads drive a 40 times higher clickthrough rate (CTR) compared to traditional display ads. More specifically, native ad CTR is particularly high in the categories of pets, food & drink, and family & parenting.
The Cons of Native Advertising
The disadvantages of native advertising are more like challenges. If you can overcome these potential obstacles, you’re in a great position to reap the many rewards of this valuable advertising strategy.
- There Are Too Many Tools To Choose From
Many companies are getting in on the native advertising game. Choosing which to use to execute your strategy is tough.
Taboola makes it easier for you. As the world’s leading native-discovery platform, Taboola helps you engage over one billion users across premium publisher websites. You know you’re gaining some of the widest reach and best targeting capabilities that native advertising provides.
- Measuring Performance Is Complex
Since native ads have a unique format, it can seem tricky to gauge their performance, but you just need the right tools and metrics. You might, for example, measure impressions, clicks, and CTR. And once readers click through to your site, you can measure views, time on site, re-engagement rates, conversions, cost-per-action, and return on investment.
Finding the right mix of native advertising metrics will depend on your campaign goals and audience behaviors.
- Creating Native Ads Is Time-Consuming
Since native ads are more engaging than traditional ads, they are more complex to produce. They must blend into their surrounding content — be it an article page, social feed, or search results. At the same time, they must grab people’s attention by providing value in an instant and inspiring people to click through and learn more.
Creating native ads involves many people, including advertisers, marketing managers, copywriters, creative directors, and publishing partners.
- Native Ads Can Seem Deceptive
There’s a fine line between an ad that is creatively mapped to its environment and an ad that tricks the user. Native ads don’t want to deceive. They want to provide a seamless transition between consuming organic and paid content. That’s why native ads should always be labeled with disclaimers, such as Paid, Sponsored, or, most simply, Ad.
- Refining Your Customer Targeting Seems Complicated
Since native advertising helps brands reach their most relevant audiences, they may need to rethink their approach to customer targeting. That is, they need to consider how native advertising can enable them to launch hyper-targeting campaigns across channels. To do so, they may need to pull more customer data, create unique audience segments, and ensure their content is personalized to each demographic’s interests and behaviors.
- Landing Pages Must Be Updated to Handle Increased Engagement
Native advertising yields increased engagement, so brands must be ready to deliver when they start to see those clickthrough rates go up. One of the best ways to do this is to optimize landing pages and articles, making sure that all post-click content matches its corresponding ad and delivers comprehensive, seamless customer experiences.
- Preparing Your Funnel for Expanded Awareness is a Must
With native advertising, brands can generate awareness about their products and services. They just have to be prepared to move those new potential customers through the next stages of the marketing funnel, including the consideration, decision, and retention phases.
After generating awareness with blog posts and videos, for example, an advertiser might educate audiences with how-to articles and demo reels. Then they might inspire people to purchase with customer testimonials. And finally, they can retain customers and build loyalty with personalized follow-ups and recommendations.
What are the Types of Native Advertising?
There are different types of native advertising, each with their own advantages. Here are five forms of native advertising:
1. Promoted listings
E-commerce sites frequently use promoted listings.. In this type of advertising, for a fee, sellers can promote their items on a given page. This puts their items at the top of most relevant search feeds or on the front page of the e-commerce site. This helps their items gain more attention.
2. Paid search ads
Paid search ads appear at the top of search engine results. They can appear in both major search engine results and individual domain results. Paid search, or pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, entails businesses only paying for an ad if it earns clicks. It’s a popular choice for native advertisers because of its affordability. However, they may see a deficit if the ad earns more clicks than sales.
3. In-feed ads
For those who want their ad to be more subtle, they may opt for in-feed ads. They appear in a site’s primary feed with a structure that looks like any other post. As users scroll through the page, they encounter ads in a less disruptive manner, making them more likely to engage.
4. In-ad with native elements
This type of ad looks like a generic advertisement and appears in relevant spaces. Advertising platforms decide where exactly the ad goes based on its keywords. For example, if advertisers publish this type of ad for a new film, it may appear next to a movie review on a popular film site.
5. Custom ads
Custom ads earn their name because they don’t fit into any of the above options. They often appear in unique places. For example, while listening to electronic music on a streaming app, a user may see an ad for a local night club’s special event. Although these ads are unique in how they display content, they still target relevant audiences.
Native Ads Examples
Mercedes in The Washington Post
This Mercedes native ad is an illustration of slick, appealing content created to grab the user’s attention and keep it there. The “Rise of the Superhuman” advertising campaign centers on technologies transforming people into “superhumans,” including artificial exoskeleton outfits, virtual reality in healthcare, and the Mercedes Benz E-class series incorporating the new Intelligent Drive system.
The native material displayed above is very interactive, with quizzes and hotspots that users can select to learn more. But one of the greatest things about this ad is how it effortlessly establishes a link between Mercedes and the “superhuman.” One of the earliest local instances is the Cadillac commercial for the “Penalty of Leadership,” which boosted the brand’s reputation as a respected leader. This straightforward newspaper advertisement, which appeared in 1915, is credited with reviving the Cadillac name and increasing the company’s lagging sales.
Viral Meme on VentureBeat
Nothing beats a viral meme in terms of sheer stickiness, and it’s a great way to promote brand awareness. We recently witnessed VentureBeat capitalize on the trend in native content to advertise the forthcoming Transform conference on artificial intelligence and analytics during the famous “Laurel or Yanny?” controversy. How? Finally, an artificial intelligence (AI) tool was used to resolve the Laurel versus Yanny conflict.
The piece quickly explains how AI was used to determine whether the stated name was Laurel or Yanny was promoted by VentureBeat. The engineers had to modify the methods discussed in the original piece to get an exact outcome.
Land Rover- A Mini Suspense/Action Movie
Land Rover promotes its cars through a variety of excellent content marketing initiatives. The movie Land Rover’s Dragon Challenge demonstrates these native content tactics in detail. It is captivating, polished, and scary. It embodies everything that a local strategy should and can be.
The world’s first effort to ascend the steps leading to the Heaven’s Gate landmark in China is depicted in this heart-pounding advertisement. At a terrifying 45-degree angle, a specifically modified Range Rover SUV safely ascended the 999 stairs to Heaven’s Gate.
In order to make advertisements less invasive and more interesting for the audience, native advertising aims to create ads that smoothly integrate into the surrounding editorial material. The essential steps in developing a native advertising campaign are as follows:
- Choose the Platform: Selecting the platform where the advertisements will run is the first step in building a native advertising campaign. This might be a news website, a social networking platform, or a content discovery network.
- Define the Target Audience: The advertiser must next identify their target market and develop ads that appeal to them. For this, it may be necessary to research the audience’s interests, habits, and demographics to provide valuable and pertinent content.
- Create the Ad: The advertiser can construct the advertisement once the target market and platform have been determined. This is a sponsored blog post, a video, or a social media update, among other things.
- Optimize the Ad: The marketer must optimize the ad for maximum engagement and impact after designing it. This may entail experimenting with alternative headlines, illustrations, or calls to action to determine which appeals to the target audience the most.
- Monitor and Adjust: Finally, the advertiser must monitor the ad’s effectiveness and make any required modifications. Enhancing the outcomes can entail modifying the targeting requirements, the ad type, or the messaging.
In general, native advertising functions by producing entertaining, relevant, and helpful material for the target audience and delivering it in a way that blends in with the adjacent editorial content. This strategy creates a more seamless and engaging user experience, which may result in higher engagement rates, more traffic, and better conversion rates.
