Native Advertising from A to Z…literally!
The Native Advertising industry is continuously evolving and can be hard to keep up with, without knowing what it all means. Reading articles to stay knowledgeable and staying informed is great and all, but only if you understand the correct terminology. Without that extra knowledge, you will find yourself trying to play catch up! We’ve put together a’ guide to help you understand the in’s and out’s of the native advertising industry.
A
- Ad Blocker: a feature integrated or added to web browsers that prevent ads from being displayed. Interruptive advertising is the primary cause of the rise of ad blockers. Native advertising, as it is seamlessly integrated in the editorial content of the website, is a good response to ad blockers.
- Awareness: Brand awareness is the level of consumer consciousness of a company. A great way to boost your brand awareness is taking your content and distributing it through native advertising.
- Algorithm: is a set of instructions for multivariate calculations that learn and adapt over time. In Native Advertising algorithms are used to optimize a campaign, deliver advertisements contextually, analyze users behavior of content consumption, etc. Algorithms generate more efficient and effective marketing decisions and higher optimization.
B
- Brand Safety: is a major issue in the digital advertising industry. Know where you want your ad to appear and next to whom. The advertising neighborhood has a huge impact on your brand image.
- Branding: aims at building a unique brand image by a consistent marketing strategy. Native advertising is an effective branding solution as it provides your users with relevant content in a non disruptive way.
C
- Conversion: is what you are looking for in your performance campaigns; turn your clicks into leads, then into customers. Choosing native advertising for your performance campaigns is a great way to help you boost your sales.
- Context: is key to providing relevant content to engage your users.
- Clickbait: is everywhere on the Internet. You are likely to click on them because their title is appealing, but there is no genuine editorial content behind that click. They are poison for the entire digital advertising industry!
- Content Recommendation: is a feature that allows you to propose other content your user might be interested in. It deepens your inventory, drives additional traffic and generates extra revenue.
- Cookies: are information on the user’s online behavior. This information is stored by advertisers or tech companies in order to understand their audience and better address their customers.
- CPC/CPA/CPM/CPL: (Cost per Click, Action, Mille (Thousand), Lead) are different billing models used to charge advertisers.
- Creative: is a code on an image file that is entered in an ad serving platform, which is then shown as an advertisement.
D
- DSP: (Demand-Side Platform) is used to buy impressions in an automated way, across a range of publisher sites, but targeted to specific users. It is mostly used by advertisers and agencies to help them buy display, video, mobile, search and Native Ads.
- Direct Response: campaigns (or better known as performance campaigns) that aim at generating leads and sales. They are measured with metrics like CPC, CPA or CPL.
E
- Engagement: measures the level of actions and interactions (different from the click) users have with a brand’s content. When done right, native advertising can create deeper levels of engagement with users and perform better than other advertising formats.
- eCPC: is the average CPC that you pay over a certain period of time. The formula to calculate it is: eCPC = CPM /number of click (where CPM is cost-per-mille). In programmatic buying, the algorithm bids a CPM based on the predicted CTR in order to reach a defined target CPC.
F
- Frequency Capping: is the maximum number of times an ad can be shown to a single user.
G
- Geotargeting: is a targeting option to address consumers in a specific location. It is one of the many features that native advertising offers.
H
- Halo Effect: the impact that the advertising environment (neighborhood) has on the advertiser’s brand image. By advertising on a premium publisher website the brand can benefit, but the opposite is also true. Therefore, advertising on an network where publishers are selected according to strict rules is the best solution.
- Header Bidding: is the up and coming technology in the field of native advertising. It allows publishers to offer their inventory to multiple ad exchanges in the same time and then increase their revenue.
I
- In-Feed/In-Read: is one of the best performing placements in native advertising as it is the most integrated format, and is very well accepted by users.
- Impressions: in the digital advertising world, impressions are the number of times an ad is displayed on a screen.
J
- Javascript: is the one of most used coding language in digital advertising. It is the language that allows you to collect users data and target your audience with precision.
K
- KPIs: (Key Performance Indicators) in native advertising the KPIs can vary depending on your objectives. When establishing a valid KPI for native, the focus should be on the value of native: getting the attention of passive users and turning them into active users. Depending on your campaign goals, if you are looking for branding results, your KPIs will aim at measuring the engagement, time spent, bounce rate, page views, etc. If you are looking for performance results, you will evaluate your results with KPIs such as clicks, conversions, leads, downloads, and more.
L
- Lead: a potential sales contact and something you can achieve with native advertising and your content.
- Landing page: is the web page on which you land after clicking on an ad. Content must be consistent through the entire customer journey. That means that the landing page must keep the promise you made initially with your ad.
- Long tail: is (are) websites that are the ones that make up for the vast majority of the Internet. In fact, it is basically all the websites that you don’t know, including those who promote illegal content (violence, hate speech…) If all of them put together, drive quite a lot of traffic, it is better for an advertiser not to work with them as they can’t guarantee brand safety and traffic quality. This is why we select our publisher partners to guarantee we won’t have any long tails websites.
M
- Mobile: is the fastest-growing advertising audience, thanks to the increase of content consumption through this device. Native advertising is the best format for mobile advertising campaigns.
N
- Native Advertising: is an advertising format that matches the look and feel of the editorial environment where it is shown. As it blends with the content, it is not disruptive, it is better accepted, more engaging and drives better results.
- Network: the publisher network is where your ads will appear, therefore it is key in your performances. It is also beneficial to have closed networks that offer a safe brand environment.
O
- Optimization: is key for your campaign success. We have dedicated account managers in charge of optimizing your KPIs to help you reach your objectives.
P
- Programmatic: is the ad buying process with data-driven automated technology. That means that you can optimize your budget or website monetization through a bidding algorithm and target your audience with better precision.
- Performance: aims at generating leads, sales and uses metrics like CPC, CPL or CPA. It is one of the two objectives of brands that use native advertising solutions.
- Premium: has greater value in brand safety, campaign results, traffic quality, and maximizing revenues. For advertisers, that means avoiding long tail websites and clickbait. For publishers, it means choosing a network carefully and be sure to only have quality ads on their websites.
Q
- Quality: in the field of native advertising, quality highly depends on who you are doing business with. Some media companies, thanks to their network and technologies, are better than others to provide solid guaranties in terms of brand safety, valid traffic, or qualified audience. In our business, we always focus on working with quality partners, both advertisers or publishers. We deeply care about providing everyone with a positive advertising experience.
R
- Relevance: is one of the most important drivers of results; if you are able to target your users with high precision, they will be more likely to click on your ads. That means that you must try to serve the right content, to the right person, at the right time and at the right place.
- Reach: is the number of users an ad can touch. It is a prerequisite to be successful; the higher the reach, the more effective your native advertising campaign can be. But importance of reach is not all that matters; you should prefer a reduced qualified audience rather than a massive unqualified one.
S
- SSP: (Supply Side Platform) is how publishers can offer their inventory programmatically.
T
- Targeting: it is who you want your ads to be shown to. There are many ways to target your audience: behavioral, contextual, geotargeting, by language, time, etc.
- Traffic Arbitrage: is a method used by many websites that consists in having you click on an “ad” that redirects you on a landing page that is full of ads and where a single view of that page generates dozens of ad impressions. You can easily recognize them, they always have an appealing headline or make an over promise.
U
- User Experience: comprises all of the aspects of the interactions between a user and a product. In the case of a native ad, it includes design, position, content, relevance, etc. As users are responsible for clicking on ads, they are the basis of the advertising industry. You need to make them feel comfortable by providing them with a positive user experience.
V
- Viewability: it is a key success factor for advertising campaigns. It is a highly discussed issue in the industry. The IAB has introduced a clear definition of what is considered visible: the rule of 50/1: an ad is considered visible if at least 50% of its surface is in the browsing window for at least 1 second.
- Video: one of the most effective and popular digital marketing techniques. Native Video is focussed on not disrupting users and that’s why it is a great way to engage your audience. Users are more likely to stop and watch as video creates more emotional cues compared to a photo or text.
W
- Whitelist: is the list of publishers that you allow to display your native ads. On the other hand, the whitelist for a publisher contains all advertisers that are allowed to access their inventory.
X
- X: That symbol you look for to close an annoying pop-up ad. This is precisely the type of ad format we don’t do!
Y
- Yield Management: is a technique used by publishers to maximize the monetization of their inventory by offering it to the best price while ensuring the best possible fill rate.
Z
- Zzz: after all this info, go and catch some Z’s so you’ll be ready to launch your native ad campaigns!
