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Native Advertising

El Toro and Native Advertising
By: Jeremy Sneed

One form of digital advertising that’s on the rise in popularity right now is native advertising.

Many people recognize El Toro as their go-to for traditional digital advertising without realizing that our ad serving capabilities span across multiple forms of digital advertising, including native advertising.

What exactly is native advertising?

Native advertising is its own form of display advertising.

What sets native advertising aside as its own classification is that with these ads, the ad itself flows with the content within the rest of the page, primarily in regards to presentation and appearance. What native ads strive to do is provide a placement for an advertisement without adding in the actual look of having an advertisement displayed.

What makes native advertisements so influential is the basic fact that typically they don’t even look like an ad at all. The ad itself follows along with the overall look and feel of the rest of the page its displayed on as well as its surrounding content. This tends to give consumers a heightened level of trust due to the fact that the ad looks much like the content on the rest of the page.

Native advertising is growing in popularity. According to eMarketer, even in just the past few years native advertising has been growing at an outstanding pace. Back in 2016, native ad spending sat just over $16 billion, now just two years later that number is estimated to be nearly double at over $32 billion. This means that native ad spending went from only accounting for 47% of all digital ad spending, to now accounting for over 58% of digital ad spending. eMarketer estimates that by 2019 this will escalate even further to over $41 billion, equating to 61% of all digital ad spending.

What’s the reasoning behind this growth in native advertising?

Due to the fact that native ads look so similar to the actual page’s content itself, they actually tend to be viewed at a higher rate than traditional display ads. ShareThrough did a study among around 5,000 consumers and found some interesting statistics behind native ad viewability. It was found that consumers looked at native ads 52% more frequently than they viewed traditional banner ads. Interestingly enough, the study also found that consumers viewed native ads even more than they viewed the actual content on the page. In the study it was noted that 26% of people said they viewed the native ad compared to just 24% who viewed the actual content itself. Along with this, consumers noted viewing native ads just about as long as they viewed the content. These consumers attested to viewing native ads for around 1 second, compared to viewing the actual content around it for 1.2 seconds.

According to Business Insider, native advertisements tend to see phenomenal performance. While we tend to shy away from using CTR to measure our ad performance, it can be a good indicator to show how well an ad can perform. While traditional display advertisements only see an average CTR of 0.08%, native advertisements on the other hand see an average CTR of 0.29%. Native advertisements see their highest performance on mobile with a CTR of 0.38%, compared to 0.16% CTR on desktop.

While native advertisements have been catching more publicity in recent years, they aren’t a new form of advertising. As a matter of fact, native advertisements have been around since the early 1900s. Back when newspapers were the most popular form of media, native ads began taking form. While most advertisements in newspapers then were boxed and set aside from content, much like advertising now, native ads began taking form as editorials in the midst of the paper. Editorials would span sometimes up to a full page and would tell a full story, all while actually being an advertisement for a company or brand.

The same concept applies to today’s native advertisements. Most of these native ads are placed right in the middle of a page’s content and look identical to the content itself, making it much less apparent that what the consumer is viewing is even an ad. Native advertising allows sites to place and show ads without having to have ads stand out so boldly.

Native Ads and El Toro

El Toro is home to native ad serving capabilities. Our ad serving portal allows for our clients to place native advertisements on many of the thousands of premier sites that we serve on.

Unlike traditional display ads, native ads aren’t a set size or look. Clients can go in and input their logo, choice text, and url. Once inputted, sites will then select what of this content they wish to use. In some cases, native ads may not even use creatives at all, but will instead for example place the advertisers text, url and ad title. The decision on what content to use and place is at the mercy of the site hosting the ad so that they can ensure it flows with the surrounding content.

Just because native advertisements exist and have stellar performance behind them, doesn’t mean display ads are gone to waste. Much as we described in our recent multichannel and omnichannel marketing post, consumers are browsing across multiple screens, sites and mediums and typically need a number of touchpoints before they will convert.

It’s imperative to execute multiple forms of advertising to your audience to ensure that you’re reaching them, creating a bold impression, and getting them to convert. With this, native advertising is best when paired with display advertising, creating a lasting impression by executing digital touchpoints across the scope.

El Toro continues to span our abilities on digital ad serving, now including native advertising. Get in contact with El Toro today and find out how you can broaden your digital advertisements to include native advertising.

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