Looking for an advertising channel with a high level of audience engagement and low competition? You’re in the right place.
Native advertising, if done well, is one of the least intrusive and cost-effective ways to advertise.
Getting started can get tricky, here are our top 6 strategies to help you optimize native ad campaigns in 2023.
Competitive Starting Bid
The starting bid is perhaps one of the most important parts of an ad campaign, especially in its earliest stages.
Every company is different, which means your bid will change depending on the goals of your campaign.
Creating a new campaign with a low starting bid will be less costly, but it will take longer for your campaign to learn and receive data.
On the other hand, you can be competitive with your bid, which will allow it to gather the necessary data in a short amount of time.
Using higher bids will allow you to stay competitive if your budgets allow it.
Monitoring Widgets
Now that you have a competitive starting bid, you need to make sure the widgets you’re buying are of quality.
There are a lot of different things to look for while determining a quality widget.
The first thing as a buyer that I typically look for is traffic. Low-volume domains, parked domains, and non-English domains are typically widgets you would like to exclude as an easy effort to get the most bang for your buck in a short timeframe. There are many tools online at your disposal, check out our recent article Why Companies Need Both SEM & SEO, to see what SEM tools are perfect for your goals.
Always keep in mind that every campaign is different which means a widget that works for one, might not always work for another. Finding websites that have high traffic, with quality ad slots is what you're looking for.
Looking at KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) such as the following will be a supplement to monthly visitors when making your decision on which widgets you’d like to exclude:
- Conversions
- Clicks
- CTR (Click-Through-Rate)
- CPC (Cost-Per-Click)
- CPA (Cost-Per-Action)
Many media buyers in the industry use proprietary AI attribution software like Cortex to help them effortlessly control traffic in real time and optimize for performance.
Doubling Down On OS/Browser
With technology being at its height, it is now extremely important to make sure your ads reach the right audience at the right time.
Another strategy that we recommend for Native Ad Campaigns in 2023, is targeting specific devices, operating systems, and browsers.
Studies have shown that over the last 28 years, the total number of internet users globally has grown to over 4.8 million.
80.3% of those users use Chrome as their default search browser. In 2021, over 75% of programmatic advertising spending in the US was focused on mobile ads.
Targeting specific devices, operating systems and browsers are more accurate and granular targeting techniques that allow you the ability to choose where and how your audience can see your ad.
Most budgets these days are spent carefully using this technique and can be used as an essential tool in making successful ads.
A/B Testing
Don’t know which headline or image is driving your campaign? Need to know which landing page is performing better?
That’s where A/B testing comes into play. A/B testing, also known as split testing, is a marketing experiment where you split your audience to test a number of variations of a campaign, to determine which performs better.
There are so many different things you can test using this method, but the two most popular are headlines and creatives.
Creatives
Ad creatives help us learn, connect ideas, answer questions, visualize, and help make emotional connections with the content on the page.
Testing images side by side will allow you to see if your ads are performing, all while spending less money than testing them one by one.
Testing creatives can be anything from testing the same image with different colored backgrounds to seeing if the text in images works or not.
Headlines
Similar to testing creatives, it is equally important to test headlines against each other.
The type of headline you use truly depends on the type of company you are in as well as the audience you wish to attract.
Some advertisers take the clickbait route with more flashy headlines. Others take a more conservative approach and stay more on brand.
The choice is yours, and A/B testing is there to help make it easier.
Bid Adjustments
We have all had campaigns that spend way too much on widgets that underperform.
The problem with this is there is money wasted on that widget, that could have gone to ones that actually convert.
This is made possible through bid adjustments. You can manually bid up or bid down percentages on individual widgets.
This allows you to feed more budget to ones that perform, and take away from widgets that don’t. For example, say you normally bid $1 for CNN.
You notice that CNN converts more than any other widget.
You have the option to up-bid the widget by 10%, which in turn will increase the spend on CNN by 10%, leaving your new bid at $1.10.
Day Parting Campaigns
In addition, to bid adjustments, you can also do dayparting.
Dayparting is where you can schedule ads for certain times of the day or certain days of the week in order to more effectively target audiences.
For example, if you’re advertising your store to local prospects, you can use dayparting to ensure that your ads only show when your store is open.
This is a foolproof way to save a portion of your marketing budget that would have otherwise been wasted.
If you are new to native advertising, don’t be discouraged if you can’t find success right away.
Native can be tricky, however, it is also one of the most popular and profitable forms of advertising out there.
Using our 6 Ways To Optimize Native Ad Campaigns in 2023 will get you started in the right direction.