Native Advertising – Everything You Need to Know

If you have been following the online marketing trends in the past couple of years, you’ve probably heard the saying “content is the king” a couple of times. Marketers have been showing a keen interest in content marketing in recent years.

A clear trend that has risen out of it is to produce content that meets the needs of the target audience. It has also allowed brands to use their written content in other ways than conventional TV, radio, and print advertising.

And native advertising is also the result of brands finding more direct and better ways to get the content before the target audience. Given the fact that native advertising consists of more than 61% of the total digital display ad spending, this is one trend that deserves your attention.

What Exactly Is Native Advertising?

Native advertising is essentially a paid advertisement, but it functions a lot differently than traditional paid advertisements. Through written content, native advertising is an ad that is disguised as the original content by a platform. You can also term it native content and use a Voluum ad tracker to track the ads.

You can think of it as the traditional PPC ad in the Google search engine results pages (SERPs). Although they clearly state that they are “sponsored,” they remain interspersed with “non-sponsored” content in the results. Since it is made to seamlessly fit in the content surrounding it, native ads are frequently mistaken as actual content.

Native advertisements can increase purchase intent by 18%. So, as plenty of visitors keep on clicking on these ads, advertisers are willing to spend big bucks on them.

You will usually find native ads in one of the following ways:

• Promoted and search listings: Ads at the side or top of the Google SERPs
• In-feed advertisements: Ads in social network news feeds
• Content recommendation: Ads as recommended articles

What Makes Native Ads So Effective?

Native ads work simply because they’re generally better received by the target audiences. It helps to keep away the ad fatigue and engage the audience effectively. Since these don’t directly come off as ads, individuals are more inclined to consume that content.

With people being inundated with ads in all forms throughout the day, they are more likely to ignore the graphic ads. Over the years, consumers have started to tune out those unwanted marketing ads and messages that keep popping up regardless of whether they asked for it or not. This is evident in the growing popularity of ad-blocking software, along with subscription models that let consumers pay more to get no ads.

One of the advantages of native ads is that it lets brands get their message through to the audience with a greater likelihood that they will respond to it. As such, native ad networks let brands get a direct link to their target audience.

Difference Between Content Marketing and Native Ads

The chief difference between content marketing and native ads is that the latter is a pay-to-play service. Brands pay to place their content in spots where their target audience will easily find it.

So, in all true sense, native ads are paid media. In the case of content marketing, the aim is to concentrate on owning media instead of paying to place it anywhere. Over time, the approach remained focused on driving profitable customer actions with the owned media. Native ads are advertising, while content marketing is essentially not.

Now, if it is a format made to appear like non-sponsored content, how would users identify it? Usually, it’ll either have markers, such as “promoted post,” “sponsored post,” or something like that. It might also have a clickable icon that tells it apart from non-sponsored content.

Endnote

Native ads are simply a place to have your content before the right people. As the brands produce so much content these days, it’s getting harder to find the right pockets of consumers that the content is serving.

One of the advantages of native ads is that it aids in eliminating any guessing game and puts the content directly in spaces where the audience is the most likely to read and click on it.

This article has been published in accordance with Socialnomics’ disclosure policy.