Advertising as part of the webpage content: Native Advertising.

   The word “advertisement” has never been so scary as it is today. We live in an era where firms are focusing even more on “catching” new customers through advertising, not just physical but mainly web advertising. Firms are willing to commit huge budgets for this activity that is strictly related to the overall business performance. The topic has not such a good reputation within consumers, since nowadays firms are literally bombarding consumers with every kind of product/service promotion stressing them. This is one of the reasons why there have been developed new ways to attract customers online more efficiently and with better results. Some of them could be banner advertising, sponsored social media posts, pay-per-click ads and so on. Today we are going to provide some details about a relatively new way of operating according to Jonathan Long’s article “Here is why you should be running native ads”.

   Native advertising is a form of publicity that matches the look and feel of the website on which it appears showing a high degree of coherence among contents. Kyle Ryan, CEO of Earnify (a native advertising platform), provides several advantages of this product.

   First of all, this is a product accessible by all businesses. That’s not something obvious since some publicity means like banner ads on big websites automatically exclude small businesses due to the high financial commitment required. The CEO provides impressive results about several slit-test campaigns undertaken, aimed to compare traditional versus native ads. The latter received nearly 25% more engagement than their opponent, which is a huge result especially if seen at scale.

  This innovative kind of advertising enables firms to reach their custom target proving to be less intrusive and more interesting than traditional means. In addition native ads are more cost efficient due to the high degree of targeting, which leads to high click-through rates and a low cost-per-click. Furthermore, native ads have been attracting more genuine interest since they don’t interrupt the user experience. 

   According to J. Long, top native ads are highly relevant to the content leading to an increase in views and therefore a higher customer satisfaction. Considering that native ads perfectly fit with their hosting pages, there will be “less resistance” from consumers, who are naturally attracted. As a consequence the quality of visitors rises and turns to be proportionally related to the overall conversion rate. This has to be fundamental for firms, which should start taking advantages of this “limited resistance” without losing more time.

   Nowadays, we all (regarded as average educated users) know how to treat standard advertising (skipping it or immediately closing it); in many cases we are almost indifferent to it. Isn’t it? Publishers and advertisers have to be aware about consumers’ perceptions and since the latter are not positive at all, it’s highly suggested to think about this new way of publicity from which could benefit all the actors involved.

Good Luck by

Giuliano Condorelli & Yves Zabal

https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/284585