Four Tips to Jump-Start Your First Native Ad Campaign
Designed to match the content style of a website, native ads hold the potential to help your brand stand out from the crowd and deliver a unique message that truly resonates with your audience. With the right content, the right type of placement and a short test period, it’s easier than ever for your campaigns to be ROI-positive. Better yet, native ads can be set up with little prior experience. It takes just about 15 minutes to get a new campaign up and running on the MediaGo ad platform.
Here’s how to make sure that your native ad campaign hits all the right notes:
- Create Engaging Content
Compelling content drives audience engagement and thus should be the top priority for advertisers. Creating good content requires the perfect mix of high-quality graphics, expertly crafted copy and a call to action that’s directed toward a clearly defined audience (a topic we cover later on). For native ads in particular, it’s important to make sure that your creative (the ad image) and title (the ad copy) match the rest of the content on the website and don’t feel out of place.
2. Choose Your Placements Well
To ensure that you reach your target audience and get the most out of your campaign, choose a placement option that makes the most sense for your product. In practice, this means making a creative with your specific consumer segment in mind, and then choosing the right placement where it’s most likely to be seen by your core demographic. For instance, on MediaGo, you’re able to select different MSN pages, such as Style, Food or Travel, and ensure that your ad appears only on pages relevant to your product.
3. Learn the Pricing Models
Different platforms offer different options for how to spend your ad dollars, and it’s important to understand the jargon before you dive into a campaign. Different pricing models can drastically change your approach to a campaign. For example, brand advertisements generally focus on achieving the highest number of impressions possible, which makes CPM the preferred choice. Performance ads — like those from e-commerce companies — aim to elicit an action from the consumer, which could take the form of a click, a purchase, a download or an install. The most common pricing models in native advertising include:
- CPM: Cost per thousand, also known as cost per mille or “CPM,” means that advertisers bid for every 1,000 impressions. This type of ad placement lacks performance targets, making it most suitable for brand campaigns.
- CPC: Cost per click, or “CPC,” allows advertisers to bid based on clicks. E-commerce advertisers prefer this model because they want to meticulously monitor their marketing funnel and click-to-cart-to-purchase conversions. MediaGo allows advertisers to buy on CPC on MSN.
There are of course additional pricing models, like cost per action (CPA), cost per install (CPI) and cost per lead (CPL), but the above two should be enough to get you started in the world of native ads. Understanding these models and their different strengths and weaknesses will help guide your marketing strategy, ensuring you get the most out of each dollar spent.
4. Clearly Define Your Campaign Goal
Measuring success is hard without a clear goal in mind. This means that to take full advantage of your ad campaign, you should first outline what you plan to achieve — this could include increased website impressions, the number of times a product is added to cart or the number of completed sales. All of these scenarios could be covered by a CPC ad campaign with a pixel. If you’re just getting your feet wet, this might sound like a lot to handle, but it’s really not that complex. We’ll get into the nitty gritty in future posts.
We hope we’ve inspired you and equipped you with the tools you need to understand the benefits of native advertising, and what you need to know to get started on your first campaign.