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 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. Technology has altered the way consumers discover, assess, and purchase goods and services, ultimately elevating the significance of digital marketing. Today, best advertising agencies are using digital marketing techniques to make the consumer aware of their products, acquire customers, and increase their product’s reach to various market segments.
Native Advertising is the concept of designing ads that are so consistent with the page’s content, design, and platform behaviour that the viewer believes the ad belongs there. Native advertisements are tailored to the medium in which they appear. These advertisements have an editorial appearance and are less intrusive and aggressive than other forms of digital advertising. When promoting a product, cause or brand, native ads are widely utilized to provide additional information.
Native ads are a great content distribution technique. Whatever type of content marketers want to promote, they can be sure it will reach the relevant audience with well-crafted native ads. A marketing funnel is a model that describes every stage of the buyer’s journey from the moment they discover the brand to conversion. 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 by nurturing leads with middle-of-the-funnel (MOFU) content, one can gently drive them to the bottom of the funnel (BOFU). However, the final stage often requires personalized product-focused content used by the brand’s sales team.
It’s a universal truth that people don’t like ads, especially if they are disrupting something. The number of active ad-blockers proves it. But well-crafted native ads have better reception. Studies show that people look at native ads 53% more frequently than display ads. The reason is that banner ads interrupt the browsing experience at every turn as they pop up, autoplay videos, dramatically increase page load time, and so on. Native advertising is drastically different as the ads match the form and the function of the website they appear within and thus make 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 brand awareness. As native ads are woven into different types of content like 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 marketers only pay for native ads to be shown, the readers might go further, sharing the content and promoting the brand for free.
Native advertising lets marketers distribute content and reach the widest possible audience. Along with building brand awareness, it’s a good opportunity to create a relationship that builds trust and loyalty among the customers. However, native ads don’t always look credible. Ultimately, it’s all about the content that is promoted with the ads. If it has no value to the reader, then it will not be of any use. However, quality content displayed on trustworthy websites will help establish a brand as a niche expert.
Last, but not least, it’s effective. It’s the biggest reason to consider including native advertising in digital marketing strategy. Native advertising drives higher engagement than traditional display advertising. Native ads have higher acceptance rates, click-through rates, and purchase intent.
But when speaking about the benefits, one must also explore the disadvantages that native advertising brings to the table:
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, one is seen as being not too pushy, making a sale without being over the top, presenting a product or service without disrupting the user experience and doing all that while spiking the consumer’s interest. It seems quite a fuss! This is 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 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 ad is encouraged.