JOINATIVE. THE WORLD OF NATIVE . BASICS EVERYTHING YOU WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT NATIVE ADVERTISING

Part I TABLE OF CONTENTS

3 NATIVE ADVERTISING DEFINED Native advertising terminology Native advertising statistics Native advertising types 9 NATIVE ADVERTISING EXAMPLES Babbel Blinkist 11 NATIVE ADVERTISING GOALS 12 NATIVE ADVERTISING CHALLENGES 13 TOP NATIVE ADVERTISING PLATFORMS 15 NATIVE ADVERTISING BEST PRACTICES Targeting Ad creation 18 NATIVE ADVERTISING KPIS

NATIVE ADVERTISING You face native ads every time DEFINED when you surf the Internet. You might even fail to notice you face Native advertising is an them. But you do. You find them online method that in your feeds, on involves using paid ads that your favorite blog or Youtube match the look of the channel. website they’re displayed on In most cases, when we talk and fit seamlessly into the about native advertising, we surrounding content. refer to content recommendations that are Native advertising lets you target widely spread across a highly relevant audience and websites, especially blogs display your content to people who might be interested in your and magazines. product or service. Both their However, in-feed ads, promoted authenticity and non-intrusive listings, and paid search ads are nature make users enjoy quality also considered types of native native ads. advertising. 3 NATIVE ADVERTISING TERMINOLOGY

In-feed ads Bid Ad types are displayed within The maximum amount of money content, product or social feeds, advertiser is ready to pay for an ad to matching the look and feel of the be displayed or clicked on (it depends editorial content. on the bidding model). Content recommendations CPC bidding Content pieces, such as blog posts, news articles, or landing Cost-per-click bidding model means pages, that are suggested to users that an advertiser will pay for each on the site they are visiting. click on their ad. As the final price is set during the auction, CPC may vary, but it won't exceed the bid set. Ad network

An intermediary that connects CPM bidding advertisers with websites that host Cost-per-mille, or cost-per-thousand, ads and helps them coordinate ad is the bidding model where an campaigns. advertiser pays for impressions. The term denotes the price of 1,000 Content discovery platform impressions on one webpage. Content Discovery platforms Smart bidding display sponsored content on widgets placed below or next to The campaign bidding strategy that editorial content on publisher allows to maximize campaign websites and blogs. Using a series performance by adjusting bids of algorithms that help to predict automatically. In this model, an what users may like, these advertisers sets the baseline bid, platforms deliver personalized which is then optimized, based on recommendations for every historic network conversion data. reader. PROGRAMMATIC GLOSSARY

Programmatic advertising DSP

The use of technology to buy and A Demand Side Platform is a sell ad inventory automatically, system used by advertisers for where advertisers and publishers buying and managing ads only set conditions that should through a single interface. be met.

Programmatic native advertising DMP

An advertising method where ads A Data Management Platform is a that match the form and feel of software that is used to store and the editorial content of the sort incoming cookie data and build website they’re displayed on are audience segments to run highly traded programmatically. campaigns.

Real-time bidding SSP

The practice of buying and selling A Supply Side Platform is a ad space through real-time auctions technology platform that enables that occur while a webpage is publishers to sell and manage loading. their advertising space inventory.

Open auction Ad exchange

An auction where all bidders An open marketplace that connected via the SSP have facilitates the process of trading access to a publisher's inventory, digital ad inventory. DSPs and and the higher bidder wins an SSPs are connected to ad impression. exchanges. NATIVE ADVERTISING STATISTICS 67% * The statistics are collected from different sources. Please find references on page 20. In 2020, advertisers will devote almost two-thirds of The average CTR for native ads display budgets to native across industries is 0.2%. ads

70% 56% $53 75%of users would rather Native video billion will be spent learn about products advertising on native ads by US through content than accounts for 56% of advertisers in 2020 traditional video ad spending advertisements

Usage of Paid Content Channels by B2C Content Marketers (%)

Social media ads

PPC (search engines)

Banner ads

Sponsorships

Native ads (social ads not included)

Partner emails

Other 0 25 50 75 100 NATIVE ADVERTISING TYPES. IN-FEED ADS

There's no single classification of native ads, as their formats are constantly evolving. At Joinative, we identify two major types of native ads: in-feed native ads and content recommendation widgets.

In-feed ads are widely spread across social media channels, such as and , but you IN-FEED ADS can also find them on publisher content sites and news aggregators. EXAMPLES

2

Sponsored Sponsored

Sponsored

IN-FEED SOCIAL PROMOTED IN-FEED CONTENT 1 ADS 22 LISTINGS 33 RECOMMENDATIONS Ads inserted into the In-feed links to product Sponsored in-feed links newsfeeds on social media pages displayed among to articles, landing pages, networks. other carts on eCommerce video content. websites.

7 CONTENT RECOMMENDATION WIDGETS

Recommended content remains a dominant native ad format. Content recommendation widgets are the units you see below or next to articles on the publishers’ websites. Sponsored content They are usually marked with ‘sponsored content’ or ‘you may also like’ labels. Being displayed within the editorial content recommendations, these units are non-intrusive and don’t disrupt the user experience.

The recommended content These recommendation widgets are often example by taboola placed on websites, including The Guardian, HuffPost, NBC News, CNN, Daily Telegraph, and more. Publishers often rely on content discovery networks to promote their own content on their own websites. Paid con_te_nt To show the most relevant content __ recommendations, content discovery __ platforms, such as Taboola or Outbrain, __ compare individual audience profiles against the targeting options advertisers set and customize widgets for every user. Today, content discovery platforms offer advertisers a large number of targeting options, allowing them to reach the right audiences at the right time.

NATIVE ADVERTISING EXAMPLES

Babbel is the world’s first language learning app. To raise awareness of the platform and reach more people willing to learn languages, Babbel runs multiple marketing campaigns, native advertising included.

No polished stock imagery. The headline features the main challenge of a person learning KEY LEARNINGS languages – learn a new language quickly. On the landing page, a reader finds a video with users' reviews. Engaging content + social proof = effective landing page.

Babbel effectively combines the power of and native advertising. The Babbel’s landing pages are their blog posts. Babbel’s main content marketing channel is their online magazine – it lets them connect with potential users and therefore achieve more registrations and downloads.

The company has been amplifying its content through a variety of popular content distribution platforms, including Taboola, Outbrain, Verizon Gemini, and Revcontent. Their ads are widely spread across the world’s most popular websites, such as HuffPost, CBS News, Forbes, Reuters, and more. 9 Blinkist runs native advertising campaigns to Blinkist is a book- scale acquisition efforts beyond social media summarizing subscription channels and generate downloads to their app. service that puts key insights of 3000+ The company distributes their content using bestselling nonfiction content discovery platforms, namely Taboola books into pieces that can and Outbrain. You can find their ads on premium be read or listened to in publisher websites (if you're in their target just 15 minutes. audience).

In this campaign, Blinkist decided to go with an intriguing headline to attract the widest possible audience. KEY LEARNINGS On its landing page, Blinkist highlights that the app is built by the world's smartest people. To encourage downloads and reach the campaign goals, a free trial of the app is offered. NATIVE ADVERTISING GOALS

BUILD AWARENESS 1 . ATTRACT LEADS is about establishing . 2 a strong online presence for your brand. If you manage to build a Native advertising has already proved general knowledge of your brand extremely effective for reaching your among your target audience, it’s likely performance marketing goals that your brand becomes the first and increasing purchase intent. thing coming to mind when these consumers are ready to take action. It allows you to attract leads by Many leverage native advertising . driving your readers to complete to achieve brand awareness goals. specific actions, such as downloading Displaying their articles and videos on your application, signing up for a the world’s most popular websites, they newsletter, or any other action that reach wide but still highly relevant connects your prospect with your audiences. b r a n d .

STRENGTHEN CUSTOMER 3 DRIVE LOYALTY 4

Along with building brand awareness or Advertisers aim at driving direct sales less driving sales, native advertising is your frequently than building brand awareness or chance to create a relationship that increasing engagements, but it doesn’t mean builds trust and loyalty. the contribution of native advertising to the sales process isn’t significant. Customers appreciate meaningful content created to provide real , Still, it’s not likely that someone will decide rather than simply make money. to make a purchase when seeing your sponsored content for the first time. That’s Due to their form, native ads don’t why campaigns aimed at driving sales are necessarily make a pitch for a product more likely to be successful when you’re or service. targeting people who are most interested in buying your products, e.g., retargeting your website visitors.

11 NATIVE ADVERTISING CHALLENGES

Native advertising takes time

Native advertising is undoubtedly a powerful method of online marketing, but you need to do it right to leverage its full potential. To attract your audience’s attention and convert them into customers, your native ads should truly stand out from the crowd. Without relevant experience, creating a genuine native ad can be challenging and takes time.

It’s difficult to take your pick among multiple options

When you finally decide to invest in native advertising, you need to choose the right platform that will help you achieve your marketing goals. There’s definitely no shortage of native advertising companies, and it hardly makes the choice easier.

When you start with paid search campaigns, you go to Google Ads; when you advertise on social media, you go with Facebook, Instagram, etc. But what are the best native ad networks to go with? How many platforms should you use to expand your reach? Is there a specific network that’s better suited for your industry or business? These are just a few questions advertisers face entering native advertising.

Measuring native ads performance can be troublesome

Does native advertising really work for you? Do you know which metrics you should track? Measuring ROI is still a conundrum for many brands. Native advertising performance can often be challenging to measure, especially when you run several campaigns at once. 12 TOP NATIVE ADVERTISING PLATFORMS

Taboola is the world's leading content discovery Outbrain is another popular content discovery and native advertising platform that helps platform that displays boxes of links on marketers to reach over 1.4 billion unique users publishers' websites. every month. Their recommended content appears across The platform also lets you fully control your absolute top-quality placements, including CNN, campaigns – from setting your own goals to Fox News, Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, editing your campaign daily ad delivery when the Mashable, and even more. campaign is live.

Verizon Media, widely known as Yahoo Gemini Revcontent is often called the top growing or Oath Native, is the only platform that offers native advertising platform. They provide strict search and native advertising in one place. requirements for both publishers and advertisers. Content posted through Yahoo Gemini flows through Yahoo’s home page and other Yahoo’s Due to their high-quality standards, the vast publications, including Yahoo Finance, Yahoo majority of traffic generated from Revcontent Entertainment, Yahoo Groups, Yahoo News, native ads comes from Tier 1 countries such as Yahoo Lifestyles, and others. the USA and UK.

Plista is a global native Dianomi is an exclusive advertising platform that has built up an exclusive inventory of that focuses on advertisers offering finance premium editorial environments. and business related products and services. Dianomi’s native ads are displayed solely The platform allows advertisers to reach users within finance publications or dedicated across all channels and devices on thousands finance sections on multi-topic websites. of premium publishers. 80% of its traffic is from Germany, Russia, Poland, and Australia. 13 LiquidM is a universal tool for any TripleLift is a leading programmatic native programmatic needs. It's known as the most advertising company that combines in-feed user-friendly self-service DSP for efficient native ads and seamless automation to make programmatic campaign management. native advertising scalable.

TripleLift serves 176 billion monthly It provides access to 70+ billion daily inventory impressions across the world's across major SSPs and premium publishers. leading publishers, including The New York Times, BBC, The Guardian, Fox News, MSN, and more.

The award-winning advertising technology Sharethrough is an advertising automation provider. Nativo enables storytelling at scale platform that powers modern programmatic with the largest native reach and reveals display and video ads. insights that unlock return-on-content. 72% of its traffic comes from the USA. Sharethrough delivers in-feed native ads to precise audiences with off-the-shelf media packages or custom targeting.

ADUP is a native advertising tool that could be ADYOULIKE is the native advertising platform a good fit for small businesses. AdUp that combines user experience, artificial successfully works with German-speaking intelligence and semantic targeting to power publishers (90% of their traffic comes from better ad experiences. Germany), and therefore, it's widely used by companies that target German-speaking Due to the ADYOULIKE’s Artificial Intelligence audiences. solution advertisers can define a semantic context for their campaigns, using recognition of keywords and feelings in editorial contents. NATIVE ADVERTISING BEST PRACTICES

TARGETING Your choice of the targeting options will depend on the goal you set.

If you want to reach more people and build brand awareness, go with the basic targeting options. Exclude irrelevant audiences configuring audience locations, device types, or interests. Split your campaigns by different variables to tailor campaign content for different audiences and see which demographics you should focus on. Later, when your campaign is live for some time, you can check out how it performs on different websites and exclude the least productive ones.

According to eMarketer, 88% of native ads will be served to mobile devices in 2020. If that’s not a case to join in on that trend, we -- Nina Benning, Media Sales don’t know what is. Manager at Taboola

If aimed at lead acquisition, advertisers opt for retargeting or creating lookalike audiences – mind that the second option is available for the US-based audiences only. If you target audiences from other countries, you'd better go with basic targeting options and optimize for the ones that deliver the best performance.

Are you aiming to drive sales? Customers are 43% more likely to convert when they’re retargeted. It’s extremely effective to target users who have previously interacted with your ads or specific webpages.

15 AD CREATION. NATIVE ADVERTISING IMAGERY BEST PRACTICES

Whether native advertising will be effective for you or not highly Creatives are really important, but depends on the way your ad looks. sometimes they are underrated by

The image is the first thing users see. marketers. First, be careful with Use high-quality and eye-catching using photo-stock images. They thumbnails to get noticed. are the easiest ones to get, but tons of other companies are using For better results, we recommend these images at the same time. that you test a lot of different combinations of titles and thumbnails in your campaigns. -- Maria Kristalinskaya, Country Manager at Blinkist

Use photos rather than illustrations. The ad creation should be easily Photographs have almost 50% higher adaptable, with excellent quality CTR. of images and spelling, which Trigger emotions. presents the message to the Use imagery that triggers an target audience. If you run a emotional response. native ad campaign, you should create 3-4 variables at least and Opt for simlicity. test which one works where. Avoid images that illustrate lots of details or text and go for simple imagery instead. -- Zsofia Toth, Programmatic and Ad Tech Lead at Euronews AD CREATION. NATIVE ADVERTISING HEADLINES BEST PRACTICES

Use power words. There are words that help writers impress their audience, get them excited, or encourage them to keep reading. These words might include emotional trigger words, such as joyful, astonishing, abusive, anxious, mind-blowing, etc. Having a clear understanding Be precise. of one’s audience enables Compare the following two titles: ‘How to climb the corporate ladder’ and advertisers to create ‘Amazon CMO shares tips to build a meaningful creatives, select successful career,’ which one would relevant publishers and you rather click on? target better performing Stay credible. native placements. Mind that your ad headline should be not only engaging but also simple and clear. Setting unrealistic expectations, -- Tatevik Mkrtchyan, you’ll attract broad audiences and pay Marketing Manager at LiquidM for clicks from people who won’t interact with your content afterwards.

Denote a benefit.

What will happen to users if they click? Will they learn something? Then use the ‘learn’ or ‘discover’ keyword. Will they get a discount? Mention it in the title. NATIVE ADVERTISING KPIS

Measuring native advertising performance will help you not only evaluate its effectiveness for your brand but also optimize your campaigns for better results. It’s crucial to know what metrics you should be tracking on your way to reaching your native advertising goals. And here’s where the biggest challenge for many marketers arises. Your native advertising performance metrics will differ depending on the goals you set.

If you decide to use native advertising to boost brand awareness, the following metrics will show you whether you’re on the right track.

Viewable impressions Video views & video completion rate

Native ads leave a brand impression on viewers, If you use native ads to promote videos, these even though they don’t continue on to your metrics will be the most important for you. website.Viewable impressions tell you how many Content discovery platforms, such as Taboola or times your native ad is seen by users. Don’t Outbrain, allow you to track the number of confuse it with the ‘impressions’ metric that completed views only. Placing native ad videos counts how many times a campaign item is on social networks, including Facebook or displayed. YouTube, you’ll find data on average view duration, audience retention reports, and Unique visitors completion reports.

How many people visited your website after Behavior metrics seeing your native ad? If your website traffic increases significantly after you launch your After people click on your native ad and come to campaign – that’s a good sign of growing brand your website, they interact with it differently. To awareness. analyze the quality of this web traffic, track the following metrics with Google Analytics. CTR Bounce rate Pages per session Knowing the CTR of your campaign items, you can better understand if the content you promote Average session duration meets interests of the publisher’s audience. Returning users 18 NATIVE ADVERTISING KPIS

If you campaign is aimed at attracting leads by driving your readers to complete specific actions that connect your prospect with your brand, the following KPIs will tell you whether your campaign is effective or not.

CTR CVR

Even though the number of clicks isn't your major The conversion rate is the percentage of performance indicator for these campaigns, you people who completed the desired action out still want to know whether your ads attract users of people who clicked on your ad. or not. For instance, if 1000 people visited your website and 100 of them started a free trial, Conversions your conversion rate is 10%. This metric will tell you whether you should audit your landing A conversion driven by your native ad campaign page, revisit your messaging, or even isn’t necessarily a sale. At this stage, conversions reconsider your initial objective. include ebook downloads, signups, and other actions that help you attract leads. If you’ve been CPL successfully building brand awareness for some time, you might want to move on by creating true The metric tells you how cost- brand affinity. effective your marketing campaigns are when it comes to lead acquisition. How many people completed the desired action? Analyze the number of conversions your Lowering your cost-per-lead without affecting sponsored content generates to understand how lead quality is always a challenge. But if you it’s perceived by your target audience. see a decrease in CPL accompanied by a lift in leads and CVR, you’re on the right track.

If your goal is to drive sales, your KPIs will be similar to the ones we mentioned for the lead acquisition goal, but this time your conversion will be a sale.

NOTE: When your goal is a sale, native advertising should be measured not only as a separate technique but also as a part of your overall game plan. To be fair to each piece of the customer journey, we recommend that you turn to attribution modeling. ABOUT JOINATIVE

JOINATIVE. helps with management and optimization of your native advertising campaigns. With JOINATIVE., you'll get support in your native advertising efforts from launching your first campaign to making the most out of the performance reporting.

NATIVE STARTER NATIVE PRO NATIVE MANAGED

Native advertising Native advertising Native advertising consultancy. management and agency. optimization tool.

Together, we’ll launch, With Native Pro, you get We'll manage your native test, and optimize access to cross-platform campaigns and make sure campaigns to high reporting, rule-based your performance goals are performance. Eventually, optimization, alerts and met. your team will be ready to data structuring for all manage and scale your campaigns. campaigns without any assistance.

REFERENCES

https://www.emarketer.com/content/us-native-advertising-2019 https://www.outbrain.com/blog/native-ads-vs-display-ads/ https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/wp- content/uploads/2016/01/NEOMG_Whitepaper_final_11-10-15_lk.pdf https://www.emarketer.com/chart/233247/usage-of-paid-content- distribution-channels-by-b2c-content-marketers-worldwide-july-2019- of-respondents

20 U N L O C K N A T I V E A D V E R T I S I N G W I T H

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