As more and more content becomes made for mobile, native advertising is predicted to become a multi-billion dollar industry. Based on its effectiveness, native advertising is quickly becoming as popular — if not more popular — than traditional display advertising.
Native advertising is branded content that matches the platform on which it appears. That means that though your ad appears on a website, it’s made to blend in with that website by matching its design and consistency.
Banner blindness, or when a site visitor ignores site banners, is a big issue for marketers these days. According to HubSpot, this is usually done to avoid interacting with an ad that disrupts the user experience. Another reason site visitors ignore ads is because, well, they look like ads.
Native advertising helps address this issue — 64% of digital display ads are now native.
StackAdapt, a native advertising platform, can help you with your native advertising efforts. Here, we’ll take a look at StackAdapt, how it works, and more.
StackAdapt is a programmatic advertising platform that distributes and promotes content using real-time, data-driven audience targeting. It offers ad formats, including display, native, video and connected TV (CTV).
It has access to third-party segments through data providers such as Acxiom and Bombara. This allows targeting by location, industry, job function and job title. The size of their network, targeting capabilities and ad formats allow you to reach your audience while they are browsing the internet.
When using StackAdapt, you select the targeting criteria, then the ads are placed on the websites your audience frequents most. It's beneficial to utilize StackAdapt because it has relationships with multiple publishers. Additionally, there is the ability to do white-listed placement where you select the websites on which your ads appear, but doing this limits your reach.
If your brand is looking to get in front of a targeted audience to generate brand awareness and traffic at an efficient cost, StackAdapt might be a good option for you.
Display ads are placed outside the main body of a website, while native ads are designed to match the look and feel of the media format in which they appear. With native ads, the site user feels the ads are part of the website they’re viewing. Customers look more frequently at native ads versus display ads. This results in a higher click-through rate (CTR) than display ads.
Remember banner blindness? Research has shown that consumers are so bombarded by ads that they now easily tune them out, choosing instead to simply scroll to the page content they want. Not only that, but many consumers have adopted ad blocking software to keep from seeing ads.
Do: Promote ungated content
For our clients, the Kuno team recommends promoting ungated content like interactive landing pages, blog posts and articles with StackAdapt. Consider a short headline, description and image with no text in order to match the publisher’s site. We recommend utilizing tracking parameters in the URL to segment the data for reporting.
Don’t: Use native ads for lead generation
When someone is just browsing a website reading articles, they don't want to see an ad to fill out a form. Your audience is likely to be further up in the funnel so don't try to push bottom-funnel offers.
Do: Engage and educate the reader
Like the above example, your audience is likely browsing a website, and because they’re farther up in the funnel, they’re not ready to be explicitly sold to. Connect and engage with your audience by providing educational content first and information about your product or service last.
Don’t: Forget about audience personas
You’re likely familiar with buyer personas, but when it comes to native advertising and sponsored content, you also need to be familiar with audience personas. When you’re using native ads, it’s important to use audience personas instead of buyer personas because your buyer personas and audience personas have the potential to be very different.
For audience personas, consider: What are the demographic characteristics of your target audience? What are their interests? What kind of lifestyles do they lead? Which publications do they read, and what kind of language do they use? What types of topics would they be most interested in?
Case No. 1: iCONN
Custom cable manufacturer iCONN was looking to increase brand awareness and engagement with its content. The Kuno team was challenged to find the best way to get iCONN’s highly technical, niche content in front of the right audience.
To do this, the team created a native advertising campaign with StackAdapt using two well-performing recent blog posts.
The native ads were segmented by profession based on the types of content they consume. Segmentation was also broken down by those who are connected to manufacturing or engineering companies. Third-party audience segmentation was also used to target audiences in the United States in relevant industries and areas of responsibility. This collaboration within the Kuno team was a process of researching the client’s buyers and applying this within our knowledge of native advertising.
The results:
iCONN saw:
Case No. 2: Kuno Creative
Kuno wanted to get in front of a healthcare audience. To do this, we created a programmatic native advertising campaign using StackAdapt. Third-party data segments were utilized to reach marketing professionals in healthcare. These ads pointed to a blog about healthcare digital marketing.
The results:
With the right team and the right content, StackAdapt or native advertising can be what you need to increase engagement.