GUIDE

The Complete Guide to Native Advertising

Is native advertising the future? This guide explores what native advertising is, different types, why you should use it, and how effective it is.

The Complete Guide to Native Advertising

Native Advertising Platforms and...

The Native Advertising Landscape

Benefits of Native Advertising

Why is Native Advertising Contro...

Is Native Advertising Effective and

The Key to Native Advertising...

The Complete Guide to Native Advertising

Is native advertising the future? This guide explores what native advertising is, different types, why you should use it, and how effective it is.
When you think about digital advertising, what usually comes to mind is either paid search results in Google, display banners on websites, videos on YouTube, or social media image adverts. Unfortunately, while this type of advertising works, it’s also becoming less effective over time.

Over the past few years, marketers have seen a steady decline in the effectiveness of many traditional advertising efforts.

Many consumers suffer from banner blindness and ad fatigue, while others feel negatively towards brands that continually interrupt their online activity. In addition, readers are no longer responsive to ads due to increasing skepticism and growing accustomed to digital ads. Therefore, it follows that using paid advertising, pop-up ads, and branded content could end up having negative results and ROI.

Marketers are desperate to try new approaches to keep seeing positive, profitable results from online advertising. As a result, many are turning to native advertising for several reasons, including:

Consumers are more likely to click on native ads than display ads
Native ads lead to an increase in purchase intent
Native ads generate higher brand affinity than banners
Consumers engage with native content similarly to, or slightly higher than, regular editorial content
Native ads peak consumer interest and curiosity

Native advertising is now trickling into the mainstream and becoming an essential marketer’s tool.

This guide explains:

What is native advertising
Native advertising platforms and network
The native advertising landscape
Types of native advertising
Benefits of native advertising
Why native advertising is controversial
How native advertising is effective and successful
The key to native advertising success

What is Native Advertising?

Native advertising refers to paid advertising where ads match the feel, form, and function of the host platform’s content. Marketers typically design and disguise native ads as pieces of editorial content to match the style and expectations of the platform’s users. At its core, a native ad must satisfy the following:

So what is native content?

It refers to any type of brand-sponsored content that a company or marketer commissions or pays to look and feel like natural content from the publisher’s website.

Native advertising is merely content an advertiser pays for and publishes on third-party websites. The aim is to ensure a higher content engagement rate than other paid media ads. It, thus, piggybacks on the third-party site’s efforts to reach wider audiences otherwise outside the reach of the advertiser’s channels.

The last thing you want is your content sticking out on a third party’s website because users will notice it instead of interacting with your content and message.

The Complete Guide to Native Advertising

How Native Ads Differ from Traditional Advertising Methods

Advertisers often use display banners and pop-up images to push ads to online users to ensure their products and services get as much exposure as possible. However, unlike display ads, native advertising is not a push channel. Instead, marketers integrate it into the user experience with a similar look, feel, and relevance as the content they are reading or subscribe to online.

Native ads don’t interrupt the user experience since they can choose whether or not to read the content, making it a pull strategy.

What’s more, advertisers typically experience higher click-through rates (CTR) on native ads than display ads. For context, display ads have a 0.05% CTR meaning only five out of 10,000 people who come across the ad will click. Meanwhile, these native ad statistics all show they perform better than display ads.

Native Advertising Platforms and Networks

Native advertising platforms and networks allow advertisers to create targeted ads that blend seamlessly into a particular website’s organic content. For example, social media networks like Facebook or Twitter display ads similar to other organic posts in their news feeds.

The best native ads networks and platforms have one thing in common: they help advertisers increase lead generation, prospects, conversions, and sales while allowing publishers to monetize their sites and improve user experience.

Below are examples of the top Native advertising platforms and networks:

1. Redirect.com

The popularity of Redirect.com is surging because it allows customers to buy and sell traffic through a real-time bid system. Therefore, you can buy displays, domains, pops, email addresses, and RON traffic. It also has an intuitive geo-targeting system monetizing clients’ international traffic and ensuring they benefit from an excellent RPM.

2. Outbrain

Outbrain uses intelligent filters incorporating content from many product-oriented ads to monitor the quality of native ads carefully. In addition, the company has teamed with leading publishers, markets, and niches to promote native ads.

3. Facebook Audience Network

Facebook Audience Network focuses on mobile native advertising, catering to consumers who use mobile devices to access the internet.

4. Nativo

Nativo excels in pure native advertising by exemplifying branded content within the format and language of publishing streams

5. NativeAds

NativeAds leverages other native ads networks, such as Google AdSense, expanding your campaign’s reach and native advertising effectiveness.

6. Taboola

Taboola is the largest content discovery platform worldwide, serving over one billion unique visitors monthly. Taboola partners with top publishers and sites such as Tribune, USA Today, Fox Sports, and NBC to enable both publishers and marketers to monetize their native content advertising effectively.

The Native Advertising Landscape

In today’s online space, websites and publishers constantly expose people to ads from advertisers. As a result, they are becoming blinder to these messages – particularly those they don’t find relevant.

Many people feel these display ads interrupt their experience using catchy titles, intrusive logos, and bright colors to get as much attention as possible for brands and their products. Subsequently, users are increasingly using banner blockers to avoid interruption.

On the other hand, users don’t mind exposure to native advertising even on social media sites such as Facebook, which reports that 86% of its Audience Network’s impressions come from native ads.

Therefore, native advertising will continue to take more from the total digital advertising budget moving forward. However, it doesn’t mean that display advertising is dead. On the contrary, it is excellent for reaching larger audiences (and for retargeting campaigns) than the native ads targeted approach.

Hence, finding a balance between the two that sees native ads driving traffic to your content and site and a follow-up using display ads to deliver a more tactical message to users would be best.

The following further characterizes the advertising landscape in general:

The mobile first-future is here to stay with users spending more time on their phones on mobile apps than mobile web. Moreover, the roll-out of 5G further accelerates and cements the mobile trend.
Video remain is the most sought after content online
Audio content is also on the rise thanks to surging popularity in podcasts and audio networks like Clubhouse
The wave of new demand-side platforms (DSPs) will be critical in helping media buyers access audiences directly
The cookies phase-out has started with Google Chrome retiring its advertising ID, meaning it will be impossible for brands to cross audiences between sites without additional solutions

These developments mean data will get increasingly scarce while audiences will get more dispersed across different platforms. Therefore, marketers must focus on first-party data and their capabilities to collect, activate, and segment it to remain competitive in this emerging market.

The Complete Guide to Native Advertising

Types of Native Advertising

The ideal native advertising format is different for different companies. In addition, the types of native advertising formats to consider have increased recently with different categories and subcategories. Thankfully, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) identifies six specific types of native advertising as follows to make things more clear:

The above categorization aims to add clarity to the broad and burgeoning native advertising space. However, another school of thought categorizes only three main types of native ads as follows – leaving out social media ads:

The vast majority of people who think about native advertising have either one of these three categories in mind or think of social media advertising.

Still, another school of thought claims native advertising generally has three content types worth exploring because they work within different media and social platforms. These include:

Advertorials in Magazines and newspapers: These resemble the rest of the published content but have a paid content label to avoid misleading readers
Sponsored programming on radio and TV: The paid marketing content utilizes the relation between media programs and sponsors to shine a light on the target product or subject
Promoted posts on social media: Allows advertisers to target specific groups within the host’s base of followers

The IAB categorization is the more widely used one because it is straightforward and clear – as discussed below:

1. In-Feed Ads

In-feed (in-content) native ads promote sponsored content within publications’ natural index of articles. Therefore, readers also see sponsored content from brands and advertisers on top of seeing original content forming part of a gallery or stream.

A “sponsored” tag identifies in-feed ads, which will look like other content on the platform. They are effective because of their seamless nature. They don’t yell campaign slogans at users. You can also find in-feed ads on content and commerce feeds. They may look different from one website to another because they fit into each site’s style, content, and unique user experience.

Additionally, in-feed ads can include sponsored posts on Facebook, promoted tweets on Twitter, and sponsored content on Instagram.

2. Content Recommendation Widgets

In-feed (in-content) native ads promote sponsored These refer to the sponsored content you find in the recommendations sections of content or news sites. However, unlike in-feed ads and branded content, content recommendation ads are not always relevant to the website or user preferences.

These ads often appear at the end of articles with headings such as “You May Also Like” or “Recommended for You.” These widgets are called content recommendation engines and allow brands to leverage major publishers’ audiences to drive traffic back to their content or sites. You can find recommendation widgets off to the side or bottom of a web page or at the end of an article.

Content recommendation widgets are excellent for publishers looking to increase their audience or brands looking to generate leads using content marketing. The critical thing for advertisers and marketers is creating and developing relationships with the right publishers to drive traffic to their websites.

3. Promoted Listings

Ecommerce sites use promoted listings to feature sponsored products first, usually on a category page. On top of getting brands and products to the front of the line, promoted listings are also cost-effective. Sellers like eBay no longer charge for promoted listings until they generate a sale.

As an avid online shopper, you must have seen promoted listings regularly. For example, when you land on an Amazon.com page while searching for finance books, you see several sponsored listings appear. Although those publishers paid for the media placements, they appear on the Amazon webpage as organic listings.

4. Paid Search Ads

Like promoted listings, paid search ads appear at the top of SERPs (search engine result pages). Marketers and brands use them for search engine marketing to generate traffic and within SERPs for individual domains.

Technically, paid search ads are native ads since the top paid search results you see in search engines resemble other organic search results on the page.

The terms “paid search ad” and “promoted listing” often overlap depending on publishers. For example, some may promote listings by putting advertisers at the top of search results, while others may promote businesses based on users’ current locations and previous preferences.

5. Display Ad (In-Ad) with Native Elements

Native advertisement resembles any other ads you might encounter online. You may also see them in an ad banner or container. However, what makes them native ads is their contextual relevance to other content they appear next to or the site they appear on when browsing.

For instance, an advertiser like Campbell’s could place an in-ad unit with native elements for their recipe collection on a site such as allrecipes.com. Although the ad may not look like the actual recipe posts on the site, it remains contextually relevant to the page.

6. Custom Ads

The IAB appropriately uses the term “custom ads,” a catch-all phrase, to refer to contextual ads that do not necessarily fit a specific format. For example, a marketer creates a Spotify playlist for workout music, and Spotify decides to serve up ads for sports drinks or sports products.

Given the speed of technological advancements and changes and the potential for publisher partnerships, IAB decided to leave the door open for its final type of native advertising to accommodate a range of possibilities.

Desktop vs. Mobile-Optimized Native Ads Formats

People consume more content and are more active on mobile devices, which gives it an advantage over desktop. Adverts’ click-through rates are higher on mobile devices like smartphones than on desktops. The reason is that adverts on mobile devices fit seamlessly into the feed, in emails, on social media, or as website content recommendations.

However, this advantage is not a flat-out win for mobile-optimized content. Overall engagement is still significant on the desktop, where content receives higher views and lower bounce rates than mobile. What’s more, the desktop has a higher attention span among users than mobile.

An all-rounded strategy is best, where you optimize all the native content advertising you produce for mobile but never neglecting desktop experience.

How Native Advertising Works

Native advertising follows the laws of market supply and demand where:

The supply side is the publishers or websites hosting adverts. These sites can have thousands of visitors or a large viewership daily. They allow non-disruptive paid ad formats alongside their content and earn revenue from the clicks.
The demand side represents advertisers selling products or services. Advertisers can easily create several adverts and link them to different landing pages, getting instant access to many website visitors monthly.
Networks bring advertisers and publishers together. They give advertisers the tools to create, manage, and track adverts and give publishers codes to embed widgets (for content recommendation ads) to their websites.

Native ads are typically cost-per-click (CPC), so networks charge advertisers only when someone clicks on the advert. Then, networks share a portion of the charge with publishers who host the advert.

When selecting a native ads network, consider which publishing sites and platforms they have, its rules and exclusions, and how many people could see your ads daily.

It’s essential to add that three types of people make money with native advertising:

Online marketers: Marketers are always looking to promote their brands, and many rely on native ads for brand awareness, lead generation, and e-commerce website sales.
Affiliates: Affiliates refer to people with marketing and influencer skills but who do not necessarily represent or own the products and services they promote. They use native advertising to drive traffic to their websites or their affiliate partners to sell products through content.
Web Admins: They run websites and use native advertising to drive traffic to their content, encourage audience engagement, and profit from hosting adverts within their site (also known as advertising arbitrage).

Native advertising is lucrative, provided you follow the proper advertising funnel structure.

Start by considering whether your planned adverts will attain mass-market appeal. Unlike social media advertising, native ads give you minimal targeting options, so avoid niche targeting.

Always ensure that you promote relevant content that fits into the host publisher or website’s platform and appeals to the target audience.

You also want your adverts to have a seamless user experience, so your landing page must look like a regular article and shouldn’t be too salesy. Use professional copywriting skills, portray all marketing messages clearly, and present the potential benefits. Additionally, remember to add the product placement plugin naturally.

Benefits of Native Advertising

The whole premise of native ads is to blend in naturally with the rest of the content a website or publisher features. Therefore, marketers must present their content in the same style and format as other content pieces on the site.

Users’ attention flows seamlessly between native and editorial content when browsing the website. When done right, your content should pass the intended message without interrupting users’ flow. If anything, it should contribute to it.

Other benefits of native advertising include the following:

1. Custom Content

A Time Inc. study found that Millenials, GenX, and GenZ consumers trust branded content more than traditional advertising. The reason is that they find it more thought-provoking, entertaining, and it leaves a lasting impression.

2. Increased Engagement with Interesting Content

Audiences find relevant content interesting and are more likely to look at it than display banners and pop-ups. Moreover, native content further creates an emotional connection with consumers, aligns with their personality, personalised content, and employs other engaging formats like infographics and video.

3. Drive Better Campaign Performance

Native ads are effective and perform better than other ad formats, which helps advertisers drive conversions and revenue.

4. Better Ad Placement

Native advertising allows you to place ads where readers can see them. Many users have developed a habit of avoiding specific locations and certain content types to avoid display ads when browsing.

5. Native Ads Have a Higher Click-Through Rate (CTR)

An AppNexus whitepaper revealed that native ads have an 8.8 times higher CTR than display ads, especially in food and drink, family and parenting categories, and pets.

6. Native Ads Drive Purchases

A Collective Bias survey revealed that millennials are more likely to make purchases after interacting with native ads. Many agreed that they don’t dismiss these posts and find helpful, high-quality articles negate the content’s branded (sponsored) nature.

7. First-Party Data

Newsletter owners build first-party data about their subscribers. First-party data provides marketers with a valuable source of users data and includes demography, purchase history, time spent on the website, interests, and more.

Native advertising partnerships give you access to first-party data for free and allows you to deliver your target audience relevant ads and personalised experiences. You can easily segment and monetise first-party data using a data management platform.

8. Native Ads are Not Intrusive

Native advertising is not intrusive, unlike banner ads that pop up and annoy consumers. Instead, it conditions the audience and gives them space to consume content conveniently.

9. Consumers Subconsciously Consume Ads Displayed in the Background

The context in which you place ads makes it easy for your target audience to register the product or service in their minds.

10. Native Ad on Mobile

Millennials prefer and consume more mobile-friendly ad content because it is convenient.

11. A Win-Win Situation

Native advertising provides a win-win opportunity for both publishers and advertisers in the mobile ecosystem. It allows advertisers to communicate their brand offering without worrying about annoying their target audience. On the other hand, publishers don’t worry about losing or alienating their user base while users enjoy content with no intrusions.

12. Increased Brand Appeal

When you create native content with the target audiences in mind, you can significantly increase your brand appeal and recognition reliably than other advertisement types.

The Complete Guide to Native Advertising

Why is Native Advertising Controversial?

Sometimes marketers execute poorly done native advertising campaigns. For example, they may target the wrong audience, take consumers to poor-quality sites, or use clickbait topics, leading to frustration when people click. Also, some marketers and sites fail to identify sponsored content.

Research reveals that people are happy to read promotional content when marketers identify it as sponsored, but they negatively react if it’s hidden from them.

So is native advertising controversial?

The truth is, at its core, native advertising should not be controversial. Its purpose is to pass informative content to users. Still, the problem is that some practitioners believe that they can have a more significant impact by tricking users into consuming native ads. Unfortunately, that “anything goes” attitude has a bad rep for the industry.

Native advertising is still relatively nascent as it enters the mainstream. As such, there are not enough proven standards put in place to prevent instances of deception and ensure consistent quality. In addition, labelling native ads is a significant issue as some advertisers fail to label their ads.

It’s pertinent to set up acceptable industry standards and ethical practices to make native ads transparent and trustworthy.

Native advertising raises ethical concerns because many people believe that users must clearly differentiate promotional and informational content just as they distinguish between reporting and opinion in the press. Pew Internet revealed that 23% of Americans have unknowingly shared fake stories, with some appearing as native ads.

Is Native Advertising Effective and Successful?

The primary reason native ads are effective and successful is that target audiences better receive and consume them. In addition, they help combat ad fatigue and engage the audience by offering relevant and even enjoyable content.

The effectiveness of any online content relies on its ability to attract and retain people’s attention. Unfortunately, online users have a short attention span, and numerous things compete for it from the moment they log on to when they exit.

Therefore, when you focus on usability, user experience, provide excellent content, and do it all seamlessly, your content or site can retain users’ presence for a while and secure their return.

User experience is essential to a website’s ability to attract traffic and retain users’ attention. Additionally, it enables marketers to reach a broad and dedicated audience and get what they are selling in front of the right people.

Traditional ads such as banners, videos with sound, or large pop-up images demand attention by interrupting your session because their entire purpose is getting you to notice them. So it’s no wonder many people find these traditional ads intrusive, disruptive, and annoying.

In response, consumers have grown to “tune out” unwanted marketing messages and ads they never asked for in the first place. The evidence is in the growing popularity of ad-blocking software and the popularity of subscription models allowing consumers to pay higher fees to receive no advertisements.

Therefore, native ads and content marketing offer brands a better way to circumvent these shortcomings and get their messages in front of target audiences.

Why Does Native Advertising Work?

People are used to and fed up with paid ads. As a result, many actively ignore ads using ad blockers, while others are blind to them because of their unwanted and interruptive nature.

Marketers are coming up with ways to interact with users and target audiences in non-traditional ways they otherwise would not expect and in a manner that focuses on passing relevant and informative content.

Native ads are effective because they don’t scream “advertisement” or “sponsored” and have a seamless delivery, making people feel like they control the content they wish to consume.

A survey done by Sharethrough and IPG Media found out the following when they compared native ads to standard banner ads:

Users find native ads more compelling than banner ads, registering an 18% lift in purchase intent.
Native ads are more noticeable. For example, 25% of consumers notice in-stream native ad placements than traditional banner ads
Compared to banner ads, native ads have a 9% lift for brand affinity.
Consumers are 53% more likely to look at native advertisements than traditional ads.
Native ads are more shareable than display ads registering 32% and 19%, respectively

Native ads blend in with the target audience’s user experience because they appear on the publisher’s website as valuable editorial content to consumers. Therefore, ad blockers are less likely to block your ads while users find the content appealing.

What’s more, native ads backed by publications and influencers have a social proof reinforcement. It essentially means that because consumers trust a publisher or an influencer, they are more likely to trust the content or promotions they promote.

Is Native Advertising Effective and Successful?

The design of native advertisements has one thing in common – getting users to engage with the content and click through. Despite the different approaches to native advertising, all leading to successful results for advertisers and brands, the overall ROI of campaigns matters most.

Creating and Implementing a Native Advertising Strategy

As you create and implement a native advertising strategy, it’s critical to know the following:

Your target audience and customer personas
The content you intend to use to engage with the target audience
Your goals, metrics, and KPIs
The publications and platforms where you will place ads and how they align with your target audience and customer personas
The advertisement forms you will use, such as content recommendations or in-feed social

Here is a step-by-step approach to building a successful native display campaign.

1. Define Your Goals

Your native ads goals and objectives should align with your company’s overall paid media strategy. Common goals here include lead generation, brand awareness, product sales, newsletter subscribers, and free trials or demos.

Always define your primary and secondary goals. For example, if product sales are your primary KPI, email subscribers and brand awareness should come secondary.

2. Identify your Ideal Target Audience

Native ads can target an expanded audience that falls outside your existing customer base. Therefore, if you want to tap into other markets, native ads can make it happen. Start by identifying customer personas, including demographic data, behaviour, and interests.

3. Find Your Publishers

Next, find out where your ideal audience hangs out online. When looking for a publisher, consider their brand size and their content’s relevance to your products, services, or brand. Additionally, consider the placement of your content, including where you will appear and the users’ devices and geographic location.

4. Create Your Content

The content you create should depend on the customer lifecycle. For instance, people researching your product are interested in content that helps them make decisions, while those new to your brand will be receptive to value-driven content.

After creating your content, you need to optimise it depending on your platform or publisher of choice. For example, the Ad creative may include a headline, description, thumbnail, call-to-action, and video. Ensure the copy speaks directly to the target audience’s pain points and carefully select attention-catching thumbnail imagery.

5. Manage and Track Campaigns

After launching your ad creative and content, you need to manage the campaign by setting budgets and tracking performance over time. In addition, it’s advisable to optimise the campaign frequently to maximise the results.

You need to measure your native advertisement campaign based on the type of relevant content it attracts and your identified KPIs (be it sales, B2B leads, or merely engaging traffic). However, you need to figure out your cost-per-click goal before doing this, which depends on several factors like ticket price and margins. Finally, keep an eye on your numbers, especially your return on ad spend (ROAS).

Best Native Advertisement Practices to Improve User Experience

Consider the following best practices in your native ads to enhance user experience:

Improve content relevancy with better targeting and proper placement of your content
Focus on the long run and build credibility instead of using click bait to drive traffic
Label all your content correctly, preferably using a by-line
Be aware of the subtle differences between different platforms, for example, formats and content types
Allow users to respond and give feedback on your ads, allowing you to learn about your target audience’s preferences and intentions and help you optimise future content

These guidelines will enable you to improve your user performance, click-through rates, and performance of your ads.

Using Native Advertising on Social Media

Successful native advertising on social media requires you to identify which social platforms your target audience frequents or hangs out online.

A popular social trend in marketing is using influencer campaigns. Influencers are the gatekeepers of online attention, and they have spent time and effort collecting engaged followers and subscribers you can tap. Many influencers run personal blogs and websites but are also present on social sites such as:

Why Use Native Advertising?

Native advertising enables marketers and brands to reach out to a target audience seamlessly using content that reads and looks like the surrounding content in a host’s platform. It succeeds in building trust, generating leads, creating brand awareness, and increasing traffic to your website.

Native advertising may soon overtake traditional adverts like display ads to become a reliable vehicle today’s brands use to get their message across to consumers. Customers are hungry for value and will remember brands that help fill a gap, solve a problem, or fulfil a need using engaging content.

When building an effective strategy, start by defining your audience and figuring out their needs and where they hang out online. Next, identify suitable publishers and websites to host your content before building your content and ad creative and posting it.

Additionally, use the right tools and technology to scale your native ad efforts (for example, the Passendo in-email advertising solution), and soon you will attract new leads and customers.

Passendo specialises in native advertising in email. We place ads in over 4,000 premium international newsletters and deliver thousands of ads across all its publishers. In addition, Passendo brings several unique features to email advertising, such as:

Third-party ad server allowing the company to host image ads externally and still served optimised
Real-time targeting. The Passendo email engine keeps track of your marketing campaign history for every user to bind the correct click and impression to the right campaign
Scalability. Before Passendo’s technology, advertisers had to make individual requests to newsletters to reach the same ad impression volume. Today, advertisers can serve targeted ads across 150 newsletter publishers in real-time with a few clicks

Recent research comparing the performance of Passendo (premium email ad exchange) versus the Web (other traffic sources) revealed the following:

The time spent on site: Users spent twice a long on Passendo’s campaign landing pages than other sources
Native click-through rates: Passendo had an average native CTR of 0.33 against 0.1 native CTR from other sources of online traffic
Quality of traffic: Passendo delivers a high conversion rate

Passendo offers clients a network of 15 native advertising and demand integration partners. Contact us today or book a demo to see how Passendo works.

The Complete Guide to Native Advertising

GUIDE

The Complete Guide to Native Advertising

Is native advertising the future? This guide explores what native advertising is, different types, why you should use it, and how effective it is.

The Complete Guide to Native Advertising

Is native advertising the future? This guide explores what native advertising is, different types, why you should use it, and how effective it is.
When you think about digital advertising, what usually comes to mind is either paid search results in Google, display banners on websites, videos on YouTube, or social media image adverts. Unfortunately, while this type of advertising works, it’s also becoming less effective over time.

Over the past few years, marketers have seen a steady decline in the effectiveness of many traditional advertising efforts.

Many consumers suffer from banner blindness and ad fatigue, while others feel negatively towards brands that continually interrupt their online activity. In addition, readers are no longer responsive to ads due to increasing skepticism and growing accustomed to digital ads. Therefore, it follows that using paid advertising, pop-up ads, and branded content could end up having negative results and ROI.

Marketers are desperate to try new approaches to keep seeing positive, profitable results from online advertising. As a result, many are turning to native advertising for several reasons, including:

Consumers are more likely to click on native ads than display ads
Native ads lead to an increase in purchase intent
Native ads generate higher brand affinity than banners
Consumers engage with native content similarly to, or slightly higher than, regular editorial content
Native ads peak consumer interest and curiosity

Native advertising is now trickling into the mainstream and becoming an essential marketer’s tool.

This guide explains:

What is native advertising
Native advertising platforms and network
The native advertising landscape
Types of native advertising
Benefits of native advertising
Why native advertising is controversial
How native advertising is effective and successful
The key to native advertising success

What is Native Advertising?

Native advertising refers to paid advertising where ads match the feel, form, and function of the host platform’s content. Marketers typically design and disguise native ads as pieces of editorial content to match the style and expectations of the platform’s users. At its core, a native ad must satisfy the following:

So what is native content?

It refers to any type of brand-sponsored content that a company or marketer commissions or pays to look and feel like natural content from the publisher’s website.

Native advertising is merely content an advertiser pays for and publishes on third-party websites. The aim is to ensure a higher content engagement rate than other paid media ads. It, thus, piggybacks on the third-party site’s efforts to reach wider audiences otherwise outside the reach of the advertiser’s channels.

The last thing you want is your content sticking out on a third party’s website because users will notice it instead of interacting with your content and message.

How Native Ads Differ from Traditional Advertising Methods

Advertisers often use display banners and pop-up images to push ads to online users to ensure their products and services get as much exposure as possible. However, unlike display ads, native advertising is not a push channel. Instead, marketers integrate it into the user experience with a similar look, feel, and relevance as the content they are reading or subscribe to online.

Native ads don’t interrupt the user experience since they can choose whether or not to read the content, making it a pull strategy.

What’s more, advertisers typically experience higher click-through rates (CTR) on native ads than display ads. For context, display ads have a 0.05% CTR meaning only five out of 10,000 people who come across the ad will click. Meanwhile, these native ad statistics all show they perform better than display ads.

Native Advertising Platforms and Networks

Native advertising platforms and networks allow advertisers to create targeted ads that blend seamlessly into a particular website’s organic content. For example, social media networks like Facebook or Twitter display ads similar to other organic posts in their news feeds.

The best native ads networks and platforms have one thing in common: they help advertisers increase lead generation, prospects, conversions, and sales while allowing publishers to monetize their sites and improve user experience.

Below are examples of the top Native advertising platforms and networks:

1. Redirect.com

The popularity of Redirect.com is surging because it allows customers to buy and sell traffic through a real-time bid system. Therefore, you can buy displays, domains, pops, email addresses, and RON traffic. It also has an intuitive geo-targeting system monetizing clients’ international traffic and ensuring they benefit from an excellent RPM.

2. Outbrain

Outbrain uses intelligent filters incorporating content from many product-oriented ads to monitor the quality of native ads carefully. In addition, the company has teamed with leading publishers, markets, and niches to promote native ads.

3. Facebook Audience Network

Facebook Audience Network focuses on mobile native advertising, catering to consumers who use mobile devices to access the internet.

4. Nativo

Nativo excels in pure native advertising by exemplifying branded content within the format and language of publishing streams

5. NativeAds

NativeAds leverages other native ads networks, such as Google AdSense, expanding your campaign’s reach and native advertising effectiveness.

6. Taboola

Taboola is the largest content discovery platform worldwide, serving over one billion unique visitors monthly. Taboola partners with top publishers and sites such as Tribune, USA Today, Fox Sports, and NBC to enable both publishers and marketers to monetize their native content advertising effectively.

The Native Advertising Landscape

In today’s online space, websites and publishers constantly expose people to ads from advertisers. As a result, they are becoming blinder to these messages – particularly those they don’t find relevant.

Many people feel these display ads interrupt their experience using catchy titles, intrusive logos, and bright colors to get as much attention as possible for brands and their products. Subsequently, users are increasingly using banner blockers to avoid interruption.

On the other hand, users don’t mind exposure to native advertising even on social media sites such as Facebook, which reports that 86% of its Audience Network’s impressions come from native ads.

Therefore, native advertising will continue to take more from the total digital advertising budget moving forward. However, it doesn’t mean that display advertising is dead. On the contrary, it is excellent for reaching larger audiences (and for retargeting campaigns) than the native ads targeted approach.

Hence, finding a balance between the two that sees native ads driving traffic to your content and site and a follow-up using display ads to deliver a more tactical message to users would be best.

The following further characterizes the advertising landscape in general:

The mobile first-future is here to stay with users spending more time on their phones on mobile apps than mobile web. Moreover, the roll-out of 5G further accelerates and cements the mobile trend.
Video remain is the most sought after content online
Audio content is also on the rise thanks to surging popularity in podcasts and audio networks like Clubhouse
The wave of new demand-side platforms (DSPs) will be critical in helping media buyers access audiences directly
The cookies phase-out has started with Google Chrome retiring its advertising ID, meaning it will be impossible for brands to cross audiences between sites without additional solutions

These developments mean data will get increasingly scarce while audiences will get more dispersed across different platforms. Therefore, marketers must focus on first-party data and their capabilities to collect, activate, and segment it to remain competitive in this emerging market.

Types of Native Advertising

The ideal native advertising format is different for different companies. In addition, the types of native advertising formats to consider have increased recently with different categories and subcategories. Thankfully, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) identifies six specific types of native advertising as follows to make things more clear:

The above categorization aims to add clarity to the broad and burgeoning native advertising space. However, another school of thought categorizes only three main types of native ads as follows – leaving out social media ads:

The vast majority of people who think about native advertising have either one of these three categories in mind or think of social media advertising.

Still, another school of thought claims native advertising generally has three content types worth exploring because they work within different media and social platforms. These include:

Advertorials in Magazines and newspapers: These resemble the rest of the published content but have a paid content label to avoid misleading readers
Sponsored programming on radio and TV: The paid marketing content utilizes the relation between media programs and sponsors to shine a light on the target product or subject
Promoted posts on social media: Allows advertisers to target specific groups within the host’s base of followers

The IAB categorization is the more widely used one because it is straightforward and clear – as discussed below:

1. In-Feed Ads

In-feed (in-content) native ads promote sponsored content within publications’ natural index of articles. Therefore, readers also see sponsored content from brands and advertisers on top of seeing original content forming part of a gallery or stream.

A “sponsored” tag identifies in-feed ads, which will look like other content on the platform. They are effective because of their seamless nature. They don’t yell campaign slogans at users. You can also find in-feed ads on content and commerce feeds. They may look different from one website to another because they fit into each site’s style, content, and unique user experience.

Additionally, in-feed ads can include sponsored posts on Facebook, promoted tweets on Twitter, and sponsored content on Instagram.

2. Content Recommendation Widgets

In-feed (in-content) native ads promote sponsored These refer to the sponsored content you find in the recommendations sections of content or news sites. However, unlike in-feed ads and branded content, content recommendation ads are not always relevant to the website or user preferences.

These ads often appear at the end of articles with headings such as “You May Also Like” or “Recommended for You.” These widgets are called content recommendation engines and allow brands to leverage major publishers’ audiences to drive traffic back to their content or sites. You can find recommendation widgets off to the side or bottom of a web page or at the end of an article.

Content recommendation widgets are excellent for publishers looking to increase their audience or brands looking to generate leads using content marketing. The critical thing for advertisers and marketers is creating and developing relationships with the right publishers to drive traffic to their websites.

3. Promoted Listings

Ecommerce sites use promoted listings to feature sponsored products first, usually on a category page. On top of getting brands and products to the front of the line, promoted listings are also cost-effective. Sellers like eBay no longer charge for promoted listings until they generate a sale.

As an avid online shopper, you must have seen promoted listings regularly. For example, when you land on an Amazon.com page while searching for finance books, you see several sponsored listings appear. Although those publishers paid for the media placements, they appear on the Amazon webpage as organic listings.

4. Paid Search Ads

Like promoted listings, paid search ads appear at the top of SERPs (search engine result pages). Marketers and brands use them for search engine marketing to generate traffic and within SERPs for individual domains.

Technically, paid search ads are native ads since the top paid search results you see in search engines resemble other organic search results on the page.

The terms “paid search ad” and “promoted listing” often overlap depending on publishers. For example, some may promote listings by putting advertisers at the top of search results, while others may promote businesses based on users’ current locations and previous preferences.

5. Display Ad (In-Ad) with Native Elements

Native advertisement resembles any other ads you might encounter online. You may also see them in an ad banner or container. However, what makes them native ads is their contextual relevance to other content they appear next to or the site they appear on when browsing.

For instance, an advertiser like Campbell’s could place an in-ad unit with native elements for their recipe collection on a site such as allrecipes.com. Although the ad may not look like the actual recipe posts on the site, it remains contextually relevant to the page.

6. Custom Ads

The IAB appropriately uses the term “custom ads,” a catch-all phrase, to refer to contextual ads that do not necessarily fit a specific format. For example, a marketer creates a Spotify playlist for workout music, and Spotify decides to serve up ads for sports drinks or sports products.

Given the speed of technological advancements and changes and the potential for publisher partnerships, IAB decided to leave the door open for its final type of native advertising to accommodate a range of possibilities.

Desktop vs. Mobile-Optimized Native Ads Formats

People consume more content and are more active on mobile devices, which gives it an advantage over desktop. Adverts’ click-through rates are higher on mobile devices like smartphones than on desktops. The reason is that adverts on mobile devices fit seamlessly into the feed, in emails, on social media, or as website content recommendations.

However, this advantage is not a flat-out win for mobile-optimized content. Overall engagement is still significant on the desktop, where content receives higher views and lower bounce rates than mobile. What’s more, the desktop has a higher attention span among users than mobile.

An all-rounded strategy is best, where you optimize all the native content advertising you produce for mobile but never neglecting desktop experience.

How Native Advertising Works

Native advertising follows the laws of market supply and demand where:

The supply side is the publishers or websites hosting adverts. These sites can have thousands of visitors or a large viewership daily. They allow non-disruptive paid ad formats alongside their content and earn revenue from the clicks.
The demand side represents advertisers selling products or services. Advertisers can easily create several adverts and link them to different landing pages, getting instant access to many website visitors monthly.
Networks bring advertisers and publishers together. They give advertisers the tools to create, manage, and track adverts and give publishers codes to embed widgets (for content recommendation ads) to their websites.

Native ads are typically cost-per-click (CPC), so networks charge advertisers only when someone clicks on the advert. Then, networks share a portion of the charge with publishers who host the advert.

When selecting a native ads network, consider which publishing sites and platforms they have, its rules and exclusions, and how many people could see your ads daily.

It’s essential to add that three types of people make money with native advertising:

Online marketers: Marketers are always looking to promote their brands, and many rely on native ads for brand awareness, lead generation, and e-commerce website sales.
Affiliates: Affiliates refer to people with marketing and influencer skills but who do not necessarily represent or own the products and services they promote. They use native advertising to drive traffic to their websites or their affiliate partners to sell products through content.
Web Admins: They run websites and use native advertising to drive traffic to their content, encourage audience engagement, and profit from hosting adverts within their site (also known as advertising arbitrage).

Native advertising is lucrative, provided you follow the proper advertising funnel structure.

Start by considering whether your planned adverts will attain mass-market appeal. Unlike social media advertising, native ads give you minimal targeting options, so avoid niche targeting.

Always ensure that you promote relevant content that fits into the host publisher or website’s platform and appeals to the target audience.

You also want your adverts to have a seamless user experience, so your landing page must look like a regular article and shouldn’t be too salesy. Use professional copywriting skills, portray all marketing messages clearly, and present the potential benefits. Additionally, remember to add the product placement plugin naturally.

Benefits of Native Advertising

The whole premise of native ads is to blend in naturally with the rest of the content a website or publisher features. Therefore, marketers must present their content in the same style and format as other content pieces on the site.

Users’ attention flows seamlessly between native and editorial content when browsing the website. When done right, your content should pass the intended message without interrupting users’ flow. If anything, it should contribute to it.

Other benefits of native advertising include the following:

1. Custom Content

A Time Inc. study found that Millenials, GenX, and GenZ consumers trust branded content more than traditional advertising. The reason is that they find it more thought-provoking, entertaining, and it leaves a lasting impression.

2. Increased Engagement with Interesting Content

Audiences find relevant content interesting and are more likely to look at it than display banners and pop-ups. Moreover, native content further creates an emotional connection with consumers, aligns with their personality, personalised content, and employs other engaging formats like infographics and video.

3. Drive Better Campaign Performance

Native ads are effective and perform better than other ad formats, which helps advertisers drive conversions and revenue.

4. Better Ad Placement

Native advertising allows you to place ads where readers can see them. Many users have developed a habit of avoiding specific locations and certain content types to avoid display ads when browsing.

5. Native Ads Have a Higher Click-Through Rate (CTR)

An AppNexus whitepaper revealed that native ads have an 8.8 times higher CTR than display ads, especially in food and drink, family and parenting categories, and pets.

6. Native Ads Drive Purchases

A Collective Bias survey revealed that millennials are more likely to make purchases after interacting with native ads. Many agreed that they don’t dismiss these posts and find helpful, high-quality articles negate the content’s branded (sponsored) nature.

7. First-Party Data

Newsletter owners build first-party data about their subscribers. First-party data provides marketers with a valuable source of users data and includes demography, purchase history, time spent on the website, interests, and more.

Native advertising partnerships give you access to first-party data for free and allows you to deliver your target audience relevant ads and personalised experiences. You can easily segment and monetise first-party data using a data management platform.

8. Native Ads are Not Intrusive

Native advertising is not intrusive, unlike banner ads that pop up and annoy consumers. Instead, it conditions the audience and gives them space to consume content conveniently.

9. Consumers Subconsciously Consume Ads Displayed in the Background

The context in which you place ads makes it easy for your target audience to register the product or service in their minds.

10. Native Ad on Mobile

Millennials prefer and consume more mobile-friendly ad content because it is convenient.

11. A Win-Win Situation

Native advertising provides a win-win opportunity for both publishers and advertisers in the mobile ecosystem. It allows advertisers to communicate their brand offering without worrying about annoying their target audience. On the other hand, publishers don’t worry about losing or alienating their user base while users enjoy content with no intrusions.

12. Increased Brand Appeal

When you create native content with the target audiences in mind, you can significantly increase your brand appeal and recognition reliably than other advertisement types.