Not all Native Ads are Created Equal
Mar 06 2018 | 07:55 PM | 6 Mins Read | Level - Intermediate | Read ModeAvinoam Rubinstain CEO & Founder, my6sense
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Avinoam is the CEO and founder of my6sense, an open programmatic white label native advertising platform for ad networks, media trading companies, group publishers, DSPs and SSPs. He is a serial entrepreneur with over 20 years of executive experience. He was previously CEO of Atrica (acquired by Nokia), executive at 3COM, GM at NiceCom
Avinoam Rubinstain, Founder and CEO, my6sense analyzes the various native ad units for MarTech Advisor readers to enable you to optimize performance and revenue with native ads
Native advertising became the leading form of display advertising last year.
That’s why every publisher has worked to integrate native advertising into their offering for marketers as native advertising has moved to the top of the list for media planners and buyers.
But in the same way that your family’s cat and a lion are very different cats, different native ad units look, feel and perform differently.
First, let’s review the popular types of native ads:
- Recommendation Widgets: recommendations, usually at the bottom of an article or video, to 4-6 pieces of content that ‘you might also like’
- In-Feed: a single, large native ad
- In-Ad: widgets designed specifically to fit into standard banner size including multiple pieces of content
(you can see examples in the Infographic below)
To find out which native ads perform best, I asked our data scientists at my6sense, a leading programmatic white label native advertising platform, to analyze the billions of native ads we served in the last six months of 2017.
With publishers looking to generate the most ad revenue, their most effective individual ad unit is the recommendation widget, followed by in-feed, which are 20% less profitable, and then in-ad, the least profitable of the three native ad units. Another reason that publishers like recommendation widgets is because they’re naturally suited for recommending other publisher content which is contextually relevant to the piece of content which was just read or watched.
Marketers, on the other hand, are looking for the ad unit that generates the most engagement, which is the in-feed unit, delivering two and a half times more engagement than the recommendation widgets. The strong performance of in-feed is driven by the fact that in-feed native ads include one centrally located ad while recommendation widgets include four to six ads OR content usually placed at the bottom of the content.
So which native unit performs best for publishers and marketers?
All of them.
For both publishers and marketers, the best performing campaigns were the ones which included a mix of all three native ad units, optimized A/B creative.
For publishers, the mix of ads enables reaching more different users who naturally respond and engage with different types of ads which resulted in generating the most RPM (Revenue Per Thousand).
And for marketers, the campaigns which generated the greatest clicks and engagements where ones which employed all three native ad units.
So who says that you can’t have your cake and eat it to? With native ads, yes you can.