Native advertising is leading digital ad growth as it creates a win-win situation for all. It provides useful information to consumers, a new source of advertising revenue for publishers, and higher brand recall and engagement for advertisers. Native ads are essentially content pieces that are paid for and/or written by a brand that live on a publisher’s website. They provide value to the reader’s experience without disrupting it, as they conform to the look and feel of the websites on which they are displayed.
The growth of native ads can be attributed to successfully dispensing recommended stories that educate, inform, and are relevant to readers. The key to making great native ad content: make sure it resonates with the reader. Native advertising’s popularity can be attributed to the fact that advertisers want to reach out to their audience in the most engaging and non-intrusive way possible, without disrupting the reader experience.
A native ad is a powerful way to have a conversation with your audience. So, an effective native ad will engage readers by being relevant and will help build trust between the brand and the consumer. A native ad headline is an important element that captures a reader’s attention first and creates engagement with him/her.
Headlines, in fact, serve as teasers; sharing what the content piece is about and why you should be compelled to read it. Sharethrough’s study on The Millennial Perspective on Native Ads 2016 revealed that 44% of consumers admitted to visiting a brand’s website or social media site after only reading a headline. So an uninteresting headline can easily drive readers away even if the topic is relevant to them.
Here are a few best practices to adopt for native advertising:
The effectiveness of your native ad relies on identifying the needs of different readers on different websites, and developing interesting and relevant content that they will engage with.
It’s crucial to label a native ad clearly. Readers are smart; they can see when a brand is engaged in self-promotion. So, for example, if a native ad is not labeled as ‘paid content’ or ‘promoted/sponsored by’ you’re deceiving your readers, which can cost you their trust.
Constructing an engaging, informational and interesting story, while maintaining brand relevance, isn’t an easy task. Find a unique story to tell about your brand that readers can relate to and potentially interact with it.
The basic premise of native ads is not to disrupt the user experience and blend in seamlessly within the page it resides in. So it’s important for the ad’s layout to be similar to the platform it’s being placed on.
Also known as in-stream native ads, these are designed to deliver a preview of branded content among other stories on a publisher’s website. Branded content is typically written by, or in partnership with, a publisher’s editorial team to match the other stories on the website.
IAB’s Native Advertising Playbook specifically includes paid search ads as an important native format. Paid search ads is a common term used to refer to search engine marketing or SEM activities. These ad units only refer to those ads that are presented in a format and layout similar to organic search engine results.
These are paid content links recommended as widgets on high-traffic websites using content discovery networks such as Taboola, Revcontent, Outbrain, etc.
These are not editorial content pieces, and are usually used by e-commerce websites to advertise sponsored products.
‘Custom ads’—a term coined by the IAB—is the catchall for contextual ads that don’t necessarily fit in a specific format. These units refer to ads that fail to fit into any of the other five pre-determined native ad formats.
These ads are similar to standard display ads, except content within the ad is contextually relevant to the publisher’s website.