Native Advertising: Its Pros and Cons, Its Types and Benefits

Native material comes in the form of articles, posts, and videos on all sorts of topics, making it harder for companies to draw attention. Compared to banners and direct advertising, users see native ads 53% more often and are much more interested in the product. Thus, native advertising has a number of key features: relevance to the interest of the audience, unobtrusiveness, the presence of useful and informative content, the lack of interactivity.

Why using native ads is profitable

Users often fail to recognize native ads, resulting in a more loyal customer experience. According to IPG & Sharethrough analysis, 32% of the audience is willing to share sponsored content with family or friends.

Another advantage is the certainty that readers read the branded content as well as the content of the edition.

What are pros and contras of native advertising

Advantages

• It's hard to recognize that it's advertising. Native ads are customized to the platform on which they are placed. Potential buyers can see it just as they see other articles. Therefore, the likelihood that your message will reach the buyer is very high.

• It doesn't annoy potential customers. The native ads don't not urge customers to buy or immediately order products. It informs about something useful. There's a good chance the customer will like it or send it to a friend. This promotes your product.

• The loyalty to the brand increases. When readers see the article with natively integrated brand among the topics that are interesting to them, they subconsciously keep it in mind and can come back to it or become your buyer in the future.

Disadvantages

• Hard to be implemented. Creating original and high-quality content is a must for providing efficiency of native ads, and to do it experts are required. Thus, extra resources should be spent as it is quite hard to create and promote native ads.

• High cost. Advertising of this type on third-party resources is quite expensive, so that small businesses or start-ups can hardly afford such a budget.

• Hard to be scaled. Each native ad is created for a specific content and style. It cannot be just transferred from one resource to another, as it may be very odd and irrelevant for a different platform.

Types of native ads and its examples

An example of native ad integration with youth influencer on TikTok

Nike Cortez advertising in Forrest Gump movie

Examples of native ads in a social network

Where to place native ads

Nowadays, native content is shown in the digital space, but sometimes magazines, banners, and television become platforms for ad placement. Let's take a look at some of the sites where native content can be placed online.

Ad on Instagram*

Examples of native ads on Google search engine

How to create effective native advertising:

• Get in touch with your audience's interests (what sites they prefer).

• Find out if you can create the content yourself or if you need to involve partners.

• Choose the right content and adapt it to the format of the platform.

• Calculate how much it costs to create and host it.

• Choose ways to measure the effectiveness of advertising.

Note the important tips:

1. Native integration should be appealing for the audience, fit the format of the site, and should not be annoying. At the same time, it should be indicated as advertising content.

2. This type of advertising is unobtrusive.

3. Native advertising is viral, which should circulate among readers as word of mouth.

How to check the effectiveness of native ads

• CTR (Click Through Rate/clickability of ads) is the transition from the ad to the site, that is, the number of clicks on the link;

• view rate the number of people who viewed the ad;

• scroll-down rate this metric shows what proportion of visitors have scrolled to the end of the page;

• engagement rate is the way subscribers interact with content;

• conversion is the number of users who performed a targeted action after viewing the content.

How to increase the effectiveness of native advertising

The effectiveness of this type of advertising depends on many factors: the relevance of the information or the choice of promotion method. Therefore, it is important to pay attention to the following aspects:

For example, your target audience mainly uses social networks, and they are not particularly interested in expert blogs and portals. So you need to focus your attention on those platforms, research your competitors there, and then choose an advertising format.

There are many formats for native sales. Which one to choose depends on the platforms where you're going to advertise and on the preferences of your audience. You can experiment with the types of content: useful articles, tests or games with a focus on a certain topic. And then you can analyze and understand which information is better and more effectively perceived by the audience.

Using headlines that are too eye-catching and unrelated to the topic of the article will not lead to a positive result. The users first get interested in the title, then they read the material that they don't appreciate. This often leads to disappointment with the brand.

Conclusion

There are several types of native ads: promotion with bloggers or in social networks, sponsored content, and recommendations. It is placed on absolutely different platforms, from blogs to search engines.

To increase the effectiveness of native content, it is important to place it on the platforms used by the company's target audience, to select the right format and to provide high-quality material.