What is Native Advertising? Elements and Contextual vs Native Advertising

Native Advertising is form of paid advertising which blends with webpage content. You might have noticed a post with Sponsored Post, or stories with Promoted Stories, or there might a content with the tag of Recommended for You are the form of native advertising.

eMarketer has conducted a survey and found that the advertisers will spend $52.75 Billion on native advertising in US market alone.

Since the native ad looks to be web page content and may mislead the users to the advertising landing page if they click on the ad. However, this ad format is one of the most promising ad format to drive the traffic to the advertiser page, Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has enforced required guidelines to prevent advertisers following substandard advertising tactics.

Why Native Advertising?

The technology is rapidly growing advertising industry, the traditional display advertising is losing its effectiveness as users are following many ways block it. Due to this reason, advertisers are losing the control over measuring the effectiveness of the ad campaigns.

Considering these challenges, native advertising has been introduced to promote the business and services in a new format which should not looks like a banner or image or video promotion. The users can read through the piece of promotional content and visit the advertiser page clicking on the call to action button.

The advertisers and publishers prefer native advertising for many reasons. 53% of higher Ad viewability compared to display advertising. Also, the native ads are less disruptive, and the visitor might not ignore them while going through the web pages.

Elements of Native Advertising

The native ads consist of various ad element to attract the users to click on the call to action button and redirect the advertiser landing page. Here are the basic elements of native ads that attracts the visitors.

• Ad Creative i.e., image, video, or infographic, etc.,

• Headline

• Body copy or content of ad

• Landing page URL to link to call to action

• Branding includes name, colors, logo, etc.,

As the native advertising blends with the web pages, IAB has recommended the advertisers to adopt the following component as well in the ad copy to avoid misleading the visitors.

Design: The design of the ad should look like a part of the website and fits within the overall interface. Native ad should not stand out from the rest of web page content.

Location: The placement of the ad is crucial on the website and it should be positioned along with the content. The most popular slots are in-feed content, content recommendation widget or on the dedicated ad slot to that are not disrupting the visitors.

Ad Behavior: The ad behavior places a vital role in driving the traffic to advertiser landing page. Ad may redirect the visitors to a different page within the same website or may redirect to the other website altogether.

Disclosure: The advertiser should clearly mention that the content published is an ad and promoting the business or services so that the users should be aware of the content that they are going through.

These elements will help the visitors to be aware of the native advertising when they are browsing the web pages.

Contextual Advertising vs Native Advertising

There is a huge difference between the contextual advertising and native advertising. However, the native advertising has considered as an evolution of contextual advertising, but they are not the same.

Contextual advertising is driven by the website’s content and the keywords used in it. The ads shown on the websites are highly relevant to the website content. On the other hand, native ads are visually relevant to the website. Native ads may not be contextually relevant to the website except the in-ad native element units.

Conclusion: Native ad is one of the ad formats which is less disruptive ad format compared to other formats. These ads are highly interactive compared display advertising and advertisers can measure the effectiveness of the ad. Most of the publishers prefer to display native advertising within their content and feeds to avoid losing the visitor due to multiple disruptive ads being published.