Native ads have been around for a long time. They seem to be here to stay as long as online advertising is a thing!
Native ads are a great way to advertise, and they often bring in quality traffic as well as interested buyers who actually convert. So, missing out on native ads can be a really bad business move if you decide to do it, so learning how to run them is important if you want to make the most of your advertising efforts!
What Are Native Ads?
We all know what native ads are, but as a quick refresher, let’s cover the basics!
Native ads are adverts that fit in both look and feel with the content of the site they are hosted on. If they are hosted on a news site (like they usually are) they look like another news article and for the most part have the same writing style, layout, and general feel.
These ads are also usually not that aggressive. They are more informative and push the conversion relatively late in the copy, so people who get to the end are on average way more engaged and likely to convert.
This is great since you bring good quality traffic in the first place, and the users who come to your product or service are interested in what you have to offer, which is kind of the point!
There are a couple of types of native ads and they are usually divided as follows:
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In-Feed Ads
This is the classic native ad that most of us are used to. They are placed inside the feed of the website and act as organic content. Usually, they have some symbol or text to show that it's “sponsored” or “promoted” content, but this depends on the site you are hosting it on.
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Promoted Listings
This is most commonly found on e-commerce sites. These ads are marketed as promoted listings and usually have “sponsored content” tags that show that the product promoted is not a part of the site's regular offers.
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Recommendations
These are often found at the end of organic articles or media. They show up as sponsored recommendations for people who finished reading/watching the main content. This can be great if you have a product that has some similarities to the thing talked about in the original content.
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Display Ads
This type of native ad is mostly found connected to regular content on the host page but with the added thing of being related to the content itself, for it to make more sense!
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Custom Formats
These can be unique and contextual. They mostly dont fit into regular categories so they can be treated as something unique!
Why Are They Effective?
The power of native ads is that they look like they are a part of the original content of the page, and they dont look like ads. People are often turned off by ads as we all consider them fake and just an attempt for someone to hustle us into buying something.
With native ads, that initial negative emotion is completely skipped. People tend to go through the page, find out more about what the product is, and by the time they realize that they are looking at an ad, they are already engaged enough to not care anymore.
It's the same thing as User Generated Content (UGC) ads on platforms like Meta or TikTok, by the time the user realizes it's an ad, they don’t care anymore, as they don’t think the ad itself is a scam.
Here are a couple of other reasons that might convince you:
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Prevents Ad Blindness
Nowadays everyone is used to ads. People know what ads look like, where they appear, how they try to lure you in to click, and they generally dislike them. This has caused a lot of people to ignore ads completely, and this is called ad blindness. With native ads, this isn't as much of a problem, as the ads look like regular content, and people tend to not assume that it's an ad right away.
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Avoids Adblock
In recent years, having an ad block is almost required to browse the web. Some browsers even come with it preinstalled! This has caused a huge spike in lost revenue due to potential customers not even getting served an ad in the first place.
Since native ads are integrated into the page (at least when it's done properly) they aren't affected by adblockers and they can function perfectly with them installed and running!
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Traffic Volume
Native ads are everywhere, and more websites are introducing them every day. Every news, lifestyle, tech, and blog website seems to have them integrated in one form or another. This means that there are a lot of potential clicks all across the web. Since native ads can take multiple forms, in all sorts of languages, they have a huge traffic volume that advertisers love to utilize.
How To Get Started With Native Traffic?
Ok, so it's time to cover how to start with native traffic and how to best run it, so let’s cover the bases.
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Understand Your Audience
Understanding who your audience is, where they can be located, and how to best target them is the number one thing you should do when getting started with any form of marketing. Do your market research, find the best approaches that work for those people, and learn what they like and what they don’t.
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Chose The Right Network
Based on what you learned about your audience, you can start researching what the right native ad networks are for you. Take into consideration what your goals are, what kind of content you will be running, where your ads will be published, and how each of them performs and fits your niche.
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Prepare Your Creatives
Depending on where you want to advertise and what your audience is, you will need to prepare some creatives. Try aiming for a professional style that matches the look and feel of the sites you will be advertising on. Make eye-catching visuals and engaging headlines that will get your audience interested in what you have to offer.
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Make Landing Pages
The goal of your ads is to get your audience to a lander, so you will need to work on that as well. If you can, match the style with the sites that your ads are hosted on, make sure that they are all mobile-friendly, and have clear CTAs that will get your audience to convert as expected.
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Launch and Monitor Your Campaigns
Now that you have your building blocks, it's time to launch your campaigns and see how they perform. Make sure you monitor their performance and improve anything you can based on the data you get from your live camps. Every campaign can be improved, so make the most out of the data you get and make adjustments based on it so that you can make the most revenue.
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Scale and Stay Compliant
If things are going well, it's time to scale up your campaign and spend more to get more. Sometimes people get a bit greedy at this point and they start running ads that aren’t compliant, or at least not compliant enough, and that can cause issues down the line.
Are There Any Secrets To Success?
Of course, there are things you can do that can help you achieve success, so let's cover some of them!
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SpyTools
Spy tools are incredible at finding what works for your competition without having to do costly tests yourself. If you subscribe to a premium spy tool, you can gain access to various info on how to best run your campaigns without risking anything!
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Testing
The usual motto for advertisers is test, test, test! So, if you want to always be on the cutting edge of new developments and you want to keep improving and growing, you will have to do a lot of testing!
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Scroll-Stop Images
These are images that pop out from the rest and make people stop and focus on them for a bit, helping you reach your audience. Here are some common things that you can use to help your ads:
- User-generated photos: they pop out from a sea of near-perfect stock images
- Human faces: people smiling, being surprised, or even angry can help users stop and look at the ads.
- Colors: depending on the native page, you can use a contrasting, vibrant color to pop out and get users to notice you.
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Funnel Optimization
Native traffic isn't the easiest to get conversions with, which is why a good funnel can really help. You should research how to make a good funnel and then optimize it according to your audience.
- Pre-sell pages: These help users warm up with relevant content so that they are more likely to convert later on.
- Email capture: If you build an email list, you can retarget users later on with ease and with relatively low costs.
- Retargeting: You can use your pixels to re-engage users across different platforms that both engaged before and those that didn't. This way you have a bigger chance of finding the right audience right away.
- Whitelists and Blacklists
Once you run your camps for a while you will quickly see what placements perform and which ones dont. Use this to whitelist high-performing placements and try adding more budget to them while blacklisting underperforming and low-quality placements.
Conclusion
Native traffic is one of the best and it has been popular with advertisers for a long time and good reason. Success is not easy with native, and it will require you to learn a lot, improve, adapt, and overcome difficulties. But once you do, you can open yourself up to a huge audience that not only sees your ads but also likes to engage with them.
If you want to make it you will need to have a good strategy, creativity, and the will to follow through and work even if it doesn't work right away. It takes a lot of effort to master, but once you do it can be a game-changer!
Have you run native traffic? How did you start and what do you recommend someone pays the most attention to? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below!
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