What is native advertising?

Native advertising is paid media designed to match the content of a media source. An example of mobile native advertising would be paid video content on the Youtube app. This media is designed to match the visual design and function of natural content, appearing in your feed of recommended videos.

Native advertising offers the opportunity to connect with users in a format of the user’s choosing. Native advertising can also be less intrusive than traditional ad formats such as banner ads. In addition to this, the ad’s contextual relevance means that native advertising can produce high Click-Through Rate (CTR) and boost conversions. To learn more about the pros and cons, take a look at our guide on choosing the right format for your campaigns.

These types of ads provide a great opportunity for creative exposure, and advertisers can be sure that users already enjoy the format in which the ad will be presented. Recommendation widgets and in-feed commerce are popular native advertising options, but advertisers can also use the method to distribute creative, customized in-app content.

Native Advertising also presents several challenges, particularly because these ads require a ‘native’ understanding of the platform. The more advertisers can learn about a platform, the better their native advertising is likely to be. However, the benefits outweigh the complexities of these challenges. By tailoring advertising for a platform’s forms and functions, there is an opportunity to expose users to unique content that is particularly engaging to your target audience.

Native advertising also often outperforms traditional ads. Studies have shown that even though users are aware the content was paid for, native advertising gets higher engagement than traditional advertising methods. This could be because the content can be consumed in a way that is natural and intuitive to a user’s regular media consumption.

There are laws and legal guidelines in place to prevent native ads from being deceptive. For example, you will often see text such as ‘promoted by’ or ‘sponsored’ within a thumbnail, banner or header - indicating that users will be linked to paid content.