Native advertising
Often seen as trustworthy, non-intrusive and authentic, native ads is a powerful ad format that gives brands the opportunity to reach the right audience at the right time.
What is native advertising?
Let’s start off with the official definition from the Native Advertising Institute:
“Native advertising is paid advertising where the ad matches the form, feel and function of the content of the media on which it appears”
By the very definition, native advertising can pretty much come in any size, shape and form. They are designed to fit into the environment in which they appear, and often users don’t even realise that they are advertisements.
Types of native
The three most common types of native advertising are:
- Discovery ads
- Native feed ads
- Social native
What are the benefits of native advertising?
- Puts the advertiser in control
- Non-intrusive and engaging
- They offer great flexibility
- Easy, cost-effective and quick to launch
- Increases brand awareness and trust
- Bypasses ad fatigue
- Ad-block friendly
Native ads are a great option for brands looking to increase:
- Conversions
- Brand awareness and trust
- Engagement with both new and existing customers
Native discovery ads
Discovery ads are typically bought on a CPC (Cost per Click) basis through platforms such as Taboola or Outbrain.
They typically appear on ad blocks on entertainment or news sites and aim to grab users’ attention through informative, entertaining or valuable content that is similar to the existing editorial articles featured on these sites.
This is why discovery ads are so powerful: As users are already hungry for this type of content when browsing through the site, discovery ads can be incredibly powerful.
Social native
These are generally specific to the platform, e.g Facebook, Instagram, Twitter ads or Google paid search. Naturally, the ads are designed for use only within the specific platform, and as such, they are natively engineered accordingly to fit a mould into the surroundings rather than being adapted on the fly to the publishers’ sites.
native feed ads
In similarity to discovery ads, native feed ads also tend to appear on news and entertainment sites. The difference though, is that native feed ads generally take up more real estate, meaning they are bigger and allow you to include a description as well as an image and a headline.
Advertisers submit basic assets such as text and images and on the fly match the styling of whatever site they appear on, with matching font and image sizes. So whilst it’s still an ad it feels more integrated into the publisher’s site.
Many argue they are more premium than discovery ads as they often appear above the fold so have a higher viewability which can be tracked. Advertisers are limited to buying these ads on a CPM, here at Advant Technology, we can exclusively run native infeed ads on a CPC for you.
Check out some of our native case studies here.
Great flexibility
What we love about native advertising is the flexibility it offers advertisers. Indeed, with some native ads, the only creative assets you need are a short title (45 characters) + an image. This factor certainly makes it quick and easy to scale without high creative costs.
Some publishers/platforms do however require a more comprehensive list of assets. For this reason, we would recommend having both a short and long headline as well as a short and long description + company logo and an image.
If you’re running image and text ads across any of the following platforms Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Quora or Reddit, there is a good chance you’ll be able to adapt your creative assets to work in a native advertising environment without too much work. Remember though that context is key, so naturally an ad designed to generate likes on Facebook wouldn’t adapt well to native advertising.
Targeting
We always recommend installing platform pixels for the quickest, easiest and most cost-effective tracking method. To do this, a one-time installation of Google tag manager is required. Once this is installed it becomes incredibly easy to drop platform pixels via Google Tag Manager (GTM) onto our clients’ sites without disturbing your dev team. By having pixels installed on your site you’ll be able to:
- Collect audience data that can be used for retargeting
- Track events such as conversions and sales
Buying Models
Depending on the platform, native ads can be bought on a CPM or a CPC basis. Speak to our sales team to learn more about our buying models.