If you surf the web — and as you are reading this we’re guessing you do — you’ve probably noticed an increasing number of websites including links to “related content” or “more stories” like the one you’re currently reading.
This is a trend that started a number of years ago as a way for publishers to keep you reading on their websites, which increased their ad revenue. And, slowly, publishers began accepting payment for linking to other publishers’ articles. Fast forward a few years, and that market has expanded dramatically to the point that now political and public affairs advertisers are using these ad units, now known as “native ads”.
The market for native advertising is growing dramatically — even in comparison to other digital advertising — and is expected to grow by 43% compared to 2017 according to eMarketer.
With DSPolitical, you can launch native advertising campaigns targeted to exactly the same people — and using the same data — you are using across the rest of your media plan. For many, that means you can reach the exact right voters you need to win on Election Day with these efforts.
Why You Should Add Native Advertising to Your Media Plan
There are several good reasons that most digital media plans should include native as a part of the mix. First, it increases your reach, and provides additional opportunities to engage your target audiences in a slightly different format. Second, because native is presented differently to users from standard advertising, it can have powerful engagement potential. We’ll go through these briefly here.
Native is an important part of a healthy, balanced digital media plan because the format adds additional opportunities to engage your targeted audiences online. A page only has so many display or video ad units, therefore including native content gives you another chance to bid for your audience on that page.
It is, by its nature, a different creative style, so even if you’re already on that page with a display or video ad, this additional opportunity to engage your target helps reinforce your message in their mind. And, it gives us a chance to bid on sites that may already have sold out their display or video inventory — which is of particular importance to political advertisers around key election dates.
Second, the very nature of native advertising means that it is processed a bit differently by users. Whereas digital display or video ads are seen more clearly as paid advertising, native advertising presents to the user more like content — even with clear disclosures about it being sponsored content. As a result, we’ve seen very strong engagement rates with native ads when compared to more traditional ad formats.
True Native vs. Native Display and Native Video
For our purposes, there are two main types of native advertising which are mainly distinguished from one another by where the user is sent when they click on the ad. They are both important to consider and work very well together as part of a balanced media plan.
First, True Native is an ad format that not only displays the ad itself (whether a combination of ad text and an image or a video) on a publisher’s page, but when the user clicks on the ad, they’re taken to a longer piece of text or video still framed in the publisher’s website. This way, while the content is clearly labeled as being sponsored content, the user gets the general feeling they’re still on the publisher’s site and can engage with the messaging provided without adding the friction of being taken off of the website they were already on. Moreover, the presence of this content under the publisher’s branding can’t help but lend extra authority to the content, despite the clear disclosures.
As you may have already inferred, native display and video look just like content pieces that are already on the publisher’s website, but when the user clicks on them, they are brought to the advertiser’s landing page, where they engage with the content. While leaving the publishers’ website and branding introduces a new element to the engagement, the much larger scale of native display and video more than makes up for this.
Both styles of native advertising have much higher engagement rates than typical display or video advertising, and where possible we recommend both — to get the richness of True Native along with the added reach of native display and video.
How Do I Get Started with Native Advertising?
Thankfully, with DSPolitical, you can add native advertising to your media plan without much added effort. Since we can target the same audiences using the same data, you only need to add some creative to the mix to begin to capitalize on these impactful new advertising formats.