Native Advertising 101: What are Native Ads?

Lastweek, we announced the launch of our Native Ads Platform. Whilenative advertising is the latest buzzword in the industry, criticsare holding their verdict on whether they are here to stay. If youare a part of the booming mobile internet industry and yourlivelihood depends on the popularity of your mobile business (app orwebsite), you are most probably on the other side of the fence andare thankful for the innovations focused on enhancing the userexperience and monetization opportunity.

Sofar, mobile developers have had to rely on traditional ad formats formonetizing their non-paying user base. Native ads are definitely animprovement over existing solutions and are intended to offer anin-context experience to the user by allowing publishers to adapt theads to the form, function, and content of their property. This meanshat the native ad matches the visual appeal and interactive elementsof the property. If the native look of the property is a tiledformat, the ad will also be in a tile. If the native behavior of theproperty is flipping tiles (think Flipboard), the native ad tile willalso flip. Native ads are so deeply integrated into the mobileproperty that as you scroll the screen up or down, the native ad alsomoves along with the rest of the content. In other words, it becomespseudo content. This is completely different from traditional adformats like banners, which take over a specified place of the mobilescreen and are unaffected by what is happening on the rest of thescreen. Or interstitials, which take control of the entire screen. Anative ad is an ad that looks like it belongs in your property.

Withso many players offering varying degrees of native ad solutions, howdo you evaluate the effectiveness of the different offerings?Borrowing from the IAB native advertising playbook, we have come upwith a simple framework to help you analyze your options:

Visual & Contextual Fit

• Doesthe ad become a part of the content screen that the user generallytakes notice of, or will it be a part of his blind spot?
• Doesthe ad unit have content that resembles the rest of the content onthe page or does it stand out like an eyesore?
• Doesthe ad unit match the functionality of the rest of the content orelements of the property in which it is displayed? The ad unitshould adapt to any USP that has been built into the publisher’sproperty like swipe, flip, scroll, links, and so on.

Scale & Targeting

• Isthe solution scalable as per your needs? If you are a publisher andit requires you to source the advertisers yourself, you will belimited to the strength of your Sales team. Similarly, if you are anadvertiser and have to design individual creative assets for eachpublisher that you partner with, you will hit a wall soon.
• Doesthe solution offer the right mix of mobile developers - be itadvertisers or publishers - to maximize the value of your effort?Are different genres like games, entertainment, news, brands,commerce, utilities, and so on, part of the deal?
• Giventhat the ad unit is now going to blend seamlessly with the content,the importance of ad relevance has never been greater in order toensure you do not end up annoying the user. Is the ad targeted tothe user and takes into account his engagement and usage patterns?This will depend a lot on the targeting capabilities of the solutionprovider and the amount of user data that can be used for analyzinguser segments.
• Isthere a means to disclose to the user that this is an ad unit andnot a piece of content?

Effort & Measurement

• Thereis no hiding the fact that if you want a deeply integrated ad inyour property, there will be effort involved. What matters is howmuch of your focus and effort will have to be diverted from the corebusiness.
• Whatkind of performance metrics are available for the publisher andadvertiser to measure the effectiveness of the ad unit? The basicparameters - impressions, click-through rates, fill rates,conversion rates, and/or advanced parameters like engagementmetrics, shopping cart fills, and so on.

Next week, we will dive intowhat kind of ad units would make most sense for news apps.