Why is native advertising important?

Entrepreneur and founder of PurpleBlack, an international, award-winning native advertising agency.

Native ads are ads that don’t look like ads. They’re typically found at the bottom of a news page. Today, this modern marketing strategy is a true blue ocean market, and businesses are beginning to discover its power.

Native ads are not equally suitable for every type of product. For example, because there isn’t a targeting function in German-speaking countries (like in Austria, where we’re based), the product has to be a fit for a large part of the population. For a very specific niche product with a small target audience, native ads aren’t recommended.

For anyone wanting to use native ads, native advertising platforms can help. They arrange publishers and work with companies that want ad space. Big players include Taboola and Outbrain.

In this article, based on my experience as the founder of a native ad agency, I’m going to share three reasons why native advertising brings untapped potential:

Native advertising doesn’t disrupt a user’s content experience.

In my opinion, the most distinctive feature that puts native ads at the forefront is they don’t disrupt the user. For instance, YouTube ads still use the same tactic as TV in the 1960s: When watching a certain video, an ad pops up and you’re forced to watch it, turn away or close your eyes. In any case, you’re disrupted in your experience.

With native ads, the opposite is the case. The reader is already in reading mode and simply clicks on an article they find interesting. Going through content and choosing the article, they will stumble across ads suited for them. Because the user is the active decision-maker, native ads don’t disrupt (this is also referred to as in-feed native advertising). And thanks to that, most times they don’t feel that they are consuming an ad.

Native ads aren’t dependent on consistently changing algorithms.

Most companies advertise on big social platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, etc. But many are getting more disappointed than ever. These platforms are losing slack by being inconsistent, changing up algorithms often and increasing their ad prices. If an ad platform is inconsistent, planning campaigns ahead of time is difficult. Because of that, businesses are more likely to leave the platform since it might weaken the scaling process.

And here is a big advantage of in-feed native advertising: Native ads are not tied to merely one advertising platform like Facebook or Google. Instead, natives are on the whole internet. There are different players and different traffic sources. This also makes it possible to reach people who have no Instagram, no Facebook or no Google account.

Lastly, with native advertising, there are fewer limits as to when and how you can advertise. This makes it easier to plan ad campaigns and to make the most out of an ad budget.

Scaling is easier with native advertising.

The third core advantage of native advertising is that scaling works well. It’s important to note that native ads are not the platform to test whether an offer works well or not. However, native ads can deliver fantastic results with an already functioning offer that has proven to work well on regular ad platforms. If you know that you have an added value, in-feed native advertising can transform a completely uninterested user into a buyer who wants more.

If you ran bigger campaigns in the past, especially on Facebook, you might have noticed that the CPA (cost per acquisition) increases alongside your spending. When trying to scale a Facebook campaign too aggressively, a winning campaign can turn into a losing one very fast. Quite frankly, the CPA will explode, and every price increases as well. And it’s unprofitable at this point.

On top of that, popular ad platforms such as Facebook or Instagram only make space for a certain number of ads to be displayed at a time to keep up the optimum experience for the user. This worsens if there’s an increasing demand for ad space. During busy times, such as Black Friday or Christmas, the ad space gets tighter. At some point, scaling is impossible even if you have millions in ad budget ready to spend.

With in-feed native advertising, it’s completely different. Here, you just add a zero to your daily budget, and it still works. So that’s a huge advantage of native ads—it enables you to scale very smoothly without any large price fluctuations. And the CPA will remain the same, no matter if you spend 1,000 euro per day or 10,000 euro per day.

Summary

Native advertising is fundamentally different from regular ad platforms. Distinctive benefits include:

• It’s a non-disruptive way of advertising—in-feed native advertising is dependent on the user.

• Native works as a proven alternative to Facebook, Google and other ad platforms.

• Scaling becomes much easier.

To sum it up, if you want to generate sales for your e-commerce or leads for your business, native ads might be the right choice for you.

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Why is native advertising important? Native advertising offers the opportunity to connect with users in a format of the user's choosing. Native advertising can also be less intrusive than traditional ad formats such as banner ads.

Isn't it fun to be able to window-shop freely without anyone breathing down your neck, forcing you to get something out of your will? Well, that's exactly how native advertising works. It exposes you to products or services you might like in a non-intrusive and natural manner.

In the era of banner blindness, when it’s becoming more and more challenging to reach your audience with traditional ads, native advertising is on the rise. And if you are wondering how to hop on the trend, native advertising software is your answer.

While good old display ads have been widely used for over 20 years, we only learned the term ‘native advertising’ in 2011. How did it happen that this relatively new advertising technique accounted for a $36.07 billion increase in spending in the US from 2016 to 2020?

To understand why this newcomer outran traditional display ads and how this promising approach could strengthen your digital marketing strategy, it’s time to check out the major benefits of native advertising.

Native ads are the most non-intrusive type of advertisement because they easily gel in the surrounding content, making it feel less forced and more organic. It helps the customers feel more empowered and supports the growth of your brand's revenue, engagement, and awareness. Some benefits of native ads are:

First and foremost, native ads proved a great content distribution technique. Whatever type of content you want to promote, you can be sure you’ll reach the relevant audience with well-crafted native ads.

How is native advertising aligned with a marketing funnel? A marketing funnel is a model that describes every stage of your buyer’s journey from the moment they discovered your brand to conversion.

Let’s take a look at the marketing funnel to have a better idea of how it aligns with your content marketing.

Depending on the marketing funnel stage, there's a specific type of content to support it.

Creating top-of-the-funnel (TOFU) content that builds brand awareness and nurturing leads with your middle-of-the-funnel (MOFU) content, you gently drive them to the bottom of the funnel (BOFU). The final stage often requires personalized product-focused content used by your sales team.

We’ll take a closer look at how native advertising promotes ToFu, MoFu, and BoFu content, leading your prospects to the purchase stage.

The top of the funnel is where your prospecting customers acknowledge their problem, start looking for the decision, and ‘suddenly’ come across your brand. The content you create at this stage should focus on a wide range of prospects and talk about their subject of interest but not about your brand.

The top-of-the-funnel content aims to bring in new leads and build trust, answer the audience’s common questions, and educate them.

You'll need to leverage different content distribution techniques to put this content in front of an audience that has never heard of your brand. Using the opportunity to target billions of relevant users, native advertising is one of the most effective techniques for distributing top-of-funnel content.

It’ll help you reach the basic goals you set at the awareness stage: targeting new customers, building awareness, entering new markets, and generating leads.

Coca-Cola’s native ad offers HuffPost readers to check out creative and crazy ways to surprise their family during the festive season.

During the next phases, the customer realizes there are different solutions to their problem and starts looking for the best one.

Your MOFU content should target educating your customers and showing them how they can solve their problems themselves. At the same time, you might want to highlight how much faster they could address it with your product or service.

If you go with native advertising at this stage, the campaign creation process might be a bit different from the awareness stage. First, you’d rather change the targeting settings and opt for retargeting, this option lets you re-engage your recent website visitors, existing customers, or subscribers of your email list.

Secondly, your goals will differ a lot. While different native advertising platforms allow you to set different objectives, here are several basic goals you’ll reach using native ads to promote your mid-funnel content: increase purchase intent, build trust and retarget leads.

Velasca uses native ads to promote its landing page, illustrating the shoemaking process and telling about the company’s values.

At this stage, your prospects make it right to the conversion. Native ads promoting BOFU content may lead to landing pages that offer eBook downloads, app installation, free consultation, or coupons.

The native ad saying ‘12 Million Kids Are Learning English With This App’ leads to the language learning application in the App Store.

As you can see, native advertising isn’t just another advertising method. It’s an actionable approach to content promotion, helping marketers reach multiple goals.

It’s no secret that people hate ads. I hate them, too. The number of active ad-blockers can prove it. But I have nothing against well-crafted native ads (as well as against the badly-crafted ones, to be honest). Moreover, most of you don’t mind them, either. In fact, people look at native ads 53% more frequently than display ads. Why's that?

Well, banner ads interrupt your browsing experience at every turn: they pop up, autoplay videos, dramatically increase page load time, and so on. It often seems they’re created with one goal in mind: irritating users.

Native advertising is drastically different. The fact the ads match the form and the function of the website they appear within makes them as minimally intrusive as possible.

As mentioned before, native ads are extremely useful for promoting top-of-the-funnel content. But how people interact with this content matters the most for your brand awareness.

As native ads are woven into different types of content: educational, emotional, and visual, it has a great chance of going viral. Although people rarely share highly promotional content (unless they’re marketers), many of them happily share useful or entertaining content. So while you only pay for native ads to be shown, your readers might go further, sharing your content and promoting your brand for free.

Native advertising lets you distribute content and reach the widest possible audience. Along with building brand awareness, it’s your chance to create a relationship that builds trust and loyalty.

Of course, native ads don’t always look credible. It’s all about the content you promote with your ads. If it has no value to the reader, no epic advertisement will fix it. However, quality content displayed on trustworthy websites, such as The Guardian, Daily Telegraph, or HuffPost, will help you establish your brand as a niche expert.

It’s also worth mentioning that you can promote not only your blog posts or other owned media resources but also display your articles on the publishers’ websites. Although the post will be marked with the ‘sponsored’ label, it’ll still match the form of the editorial content and look credible.

The native ad provided by Cathay Pacific & Okinawa and displayed among sponsored links on HuffPost leads to the article published on HuffPost looking like the editorial content of the magazine.

Last but not least – it's effective. It’s the biggest reason to consider including native advertising in your digital marketing strategy. Native advertising drives higher engagement than traditional display advertising. Native ads have higher acceptance rates, click-through rates, and purchase intent. Below are some statistics that prove its effectiveness.

According to Outbrain:

And more research has found that:

Although there are plenty of benefits with native advertising, marketers may face challenges with performance measurement and finding the talent and time.

Measuring key performance indicators (KPIs) such as return on investment (ROI), effectiveness, and impact with native campaigns is challenging due to their unique format. However, with the right tools and analytics method, one can make up for the lack of unified standards and track metrics like impressions, CTR, and clicks to understand the campaign's progress.

As opposed to traditional ads, with native ads, you are trying to be seen without being too pushy, make a sale without being too salesy, present a product or service without disrupting the user experience and do all that while spiking the consumer's interest. Sounds like a lot, right? And that is exactly why creating native ads requires multiple review rounds and collaboration from advertising professionals, marketing teams, copywriters, and designers.

The discrete messaging in native ads can be deceptive at times, and coming across dishonest messaging can be viewed as unethical. To avoid tricking the users into believing the advertisement is anything other than what it is, the usage of disclaimers like sponsored, paid, and the ad is encouraged. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has a guide on native advertising that offers guidance on following the best practices and keeping unfair practices in check.

Native advertising can be incredibly effective when done right. To reach your goals with it, you need to ensure that the following criteria are met:

Native advertising is a fast-growing segment. An oft-cited report from AdYouLike predicts the global native advertising market to be worth $400 billion by 2025 (a 372% jump from 2020). Consumers are more open to learning about brands through these advertisements than via traditional ads.

Whether you are a marketer new to native ads or a blogger who aims to make money while leveraging this effective marketing tool, it’s worth considering the pros and cons of native advertising.

But before that, let’s understand what native advertising is with a few examples.

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:

Here are a few great examples of native advertising.

The music mammoth Spotify can create custom playlists based on a company’s products or themes and use the data from listening history to recommend other playlists. Netflix and Spotify partnered to promote the second season of the show ‘Stranger Things’ through native advertising.

This promoted the show through the background design and logos while resonating with the listeners.

When you’re scrolling through your favourite social media feed, you’ll see a timeline of posts and content features from people or businesses you follow. But paid ads also appear in these feeds. A well-designed native ad can blend with the regular content without being seen as a paid ad.

Native advertising can also take the form of the ‘Recommended Articles’ or 'You May Also Like' sections that are so prevalent across the internet. Clicking on one of these recommended posts will take visitors to a separate page. This is a great way to avoid pop-ups and ad banners that often negatively impact the user experience. Native ads offer marketers an alternative to disruptive advertisements that are likely to be ignored or blocked by customers. But native advertising is not all roses. Let’s look at the top pros and cons of this form of advertising. This will help you gauge how much of your paid ad dollars should be spent on it.

Native ads by nature aren’t intrusive or interruptive. Further, the content tends to be highly engaging and suited for all devices. Hence, it is better received by site visitors. People are used to seeing and ignoring usual aggressive ads that push their way through the main content. Because native ads aren’t pushy in nature, they attract attention and encourage viewers to consume the content.

Native ads are highly engaging; hence, they get high views, click-throughs, and conversions.

In fact, recent research by Outbrain and CMI shows that native ads that employ a softer, trust-based approach achieve 5-10x higher average CTR than push marketing tactics.

One of the biggest challenges advertising professionals face today is winning customer trust. Customers are repelled by advertisements because they do not trust the marketers’ intent behind them.

However, native ads are customized to a person’s search intent, thus making them more credible. Customers value the content shared through native ads because they carry empowering information that’s useful to them. When this trust is won, brands are rewarded with customer loyalty.

Native ads are usually contextually targeted to the audience that will be interested in the content. For example, a cosmetics brand can launch its content on a beauty blog or a fashion website where people have already consumed similar content. Similarly, a sports brand can share native advertising content on a fitness website, targeting fitness enthusiasts.

This way, the marketer can drive traffic to their website while the audience gets a seamless and personalized experience.

How can you measure whether or not native advertising is working for you? Because of their unique nature, measuring the effectiveness of native ads is tricky.

You need to find the right tools and metrics to measure your native ad performance. Consider metrics like impressions, time on site, scroll depth, re-engagement rates, cost-per-action, and CTR. The metrics you choose will also depend on your campaign goals and audience behaviour.

RELATED: “Quite often in native advertising, we measure the wrong things”

Native ads are much more engaging and tailored than traditional ones. Hence, creating them is labour-intensive and time-consuming.

The ad needs to blend with the surrounding content depending on where it’s placed. At the same time, you need to ensure that the ad offers immediate value to the reader.

Further, creating a native ad may involve a whole team of advertising professionals, marketing team, copywriters, publishing partners, and more.

As mentioned above, few advertisers are able to stay on top of the native advertising game. There’s a fine line separating creativity and deception.

As an advertiser, you do not want your ad to appear as something that tricks the user. You want your ad to be creatively placed among the other pieces of content while not appearing as deceptive to the user.

That’s one reason why native ads are always labelled as paid, sponsored, or ad.

Before diving into any new advertising strategy, it’s important to understand its benefits and drawbacks. This way, you can prepare to increase the results of your marketing efforts and take the best approach for your business needs. Enter: the advantages and disadvantages of native advertising.

First off, what is native advertising? It’s the process of creating ads that match the form and function of their surrounding content. Promoted social media posts are native ads, for example, as is sponsored recommended content at the ends of articles.

Now, is native advertising good? According to many native advertising examples and statistics, it is. Native ads drive 8.8 times higher CTR and 18% higher purchase intent than traditional display ads.

Still, there are advantages and disadvantages to native advertising. Here, we break down the pros and cons of this strategy and provide tips on how to make native advertising work for your brand.

It’s easy to compile the advantages of native advertising. There are many benefits to using this strategy for building awareness, engagement, and revenue.

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!

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.

Native ads can be contextually targeted towards 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.

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.

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.

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.

Source: eMarketer

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.

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.

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.

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 result. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The benefits of a solid native-advertising strategy are plenty. You can use native ads to increase engagement, optimize targeting, build trust, and drive traffic to your site. You just need the right native-advertising platforms and best practices to guide you and bring your strategy to life.

That’s why Taboola exists — to help advertisers launch native-ad campaigns across the world’s top publisher sites, including NBC, Bloomberg, CBS News, and Business Insider. Because you deserve to share your messages in trusted, brand-safe environments and reach readers who are ready to consume your content — making the most of what native advertising has to offer.

For further reading on this topic, check out these articles:

In a digital-first, cross-device world, native advertising belongs in every marketer’s media mix. Native advertising matches the look, form, and feel of the media format that they appear in. Unlike banner or display ads, native ads don’t really look like ads, especially at first glance. They perfectly blend into the content that a user is viewing online.

This programmatic channel combines customized native content with the power of programmatic technology. Native advertising is highly scalable, and it’s beneficial to add to a multi-channel strategy. This is likely why native display ad spend has been steadily increasing in the US. It’s projected that spending will reach $109 billion USD by 2024.

Here are 8 reasons to use native advertising in your next digital campaign:

Native advertising can produce a high click-through rate (CTR) because ads are tailored to match their surrounding content and context. As a result, native ads fit into the user journey instead of interrupting it.

To achieve high CTRs with native ads, the key is to ensure the native ad content adds value to the user’s experience. Native ads are meant to seamlessly blend in, rather than disrupt a user’s page experience.

Regardless of whether your native advertising campaign goal is to build an audience or drive an action, the first step is to have an engaging piece of content for users to click through to.

Particularly when you compare native ads vs. display ads, native advertising is much more cost-efficient. This is because the CTR is likely higher. Since ads are typically purchased on a cost per thousand (CPM) basis, the higher CTRs can drive down your cost per click (CPC). With conversion rates held equal, the cost per action, whether it’s getting the user to spend time on the content or to complete a form, will also be lower.

Another one of the important reasons to use native advertising is the sophisticated targeting capabilities of programmatic. Your ad spend isn’t wasted because you’re able to target the right audiences for your messaging.

Native advertising allows for various types of targeting, including contextual targeting, demographic targeting, location-based, device-based, or intent-based targeting. Users will always prefer ads tailored to their interests and shopping habits, and so personalized targeting through programmatic native advertising is key to winning new customers.

Native ads are non-disruptive because they act as an extension of the browsing experience. By fitting the form and function of a given webpage, native advertising fits seamlessly into the browsing behaviour of the average web user, making them more likely to take interest in your content.

The term native advertising is broad and it’s always evolving. When this ad format first emerged, it was seen as a modern version of the advertorial. But today, it’s considered to be a separate channel designed to deliver high-quality, value-adding branded content..

This channel is versatile because there are various native ad formats that marketers can choose from. Below are three categories of native ads that you can leverage in your programmatic campaigns.

In-feed native advertising is the most common form of native ads thanks to its “mobile-first” approach and ability to drive users to advertisers’ owned-media properties. It includes promoted listings and paid results.

If you’re using StackAdapt, you can leverage in-ad native. This format uses the elements of a native ad, including image, headline, body, and brand logo. In-ad native ads appear within the display inventory of a given page. You can achieve greater reach while using elements that make native ads so engaging, when native inventory is limited.

Content discovery widgets are typically found at the bottom of a web article. Typically considered a means for publishers to drive traffic and monetize their content, some marketers see value in reaching a wide audience in a cost-effective manner through content recommendation.

Native advertising presents a unique opportunity to share your brand story. The combination of imagery, headline, and description allows advertisers to succinctly state their message, represent their target demographic, and even give extra information on the benefits, values, and story behind the product or service. Beyond the ad, the click-through content presents the opportunity to push the message even further.

Since native advertising is powered by programmatic, it comes with detailed campaign reporting. You have the ability to track campaign metrics that are most important to you. When programmatic campaign reporting is set up effectively, it will provide you with insights that are necessary to drive increased performance. Metrics can be pulled from campaign results, and then used to help you narrow down who, when, and where to target in your future campaigns.

This might be one of the absolute most important reasons to use native advertising. It’s the perfect channel to use as part of a multi-channel campaign. A multi-channel strategy enables you to reach consumers throughout the entire funnel.

The goal of this strategy is to create a cohesive story across various programmatic channels like video, connected TV (CTV), and audio. Native advertising is the perfect channel to add to your multi-channel campaign because it will help to increase the percentage of the total target audience that you can reach, and it helps you to craft a brand story throughout the entire customer journey.

The best way to use native ads is to use them to educate your target audience. They align with content and blog posts in the way they are formatted, and so they can be used to deliver information and answers that your audience might be looking for.

Want to run exceptional programmatic campaigns? Request a demo to learn more about StackAdapt.