Tips & Guides — 15 Oct 2020
Advertising Campaigns: Best Practices
We caught up with Sydney Mann, content writer at Taboola, world’s leading discovery & native advertising platform, to find out the latest trends and examples of best practices in native advertising.
Each and every day, people turn to editorial sites to stay up-to-date on news, entertainment and information around the world. According to Pew Research Center, 37% of U.S. adults report consuming their news online.
But, even more than just turning to these sites, people put their trust into editorial sites. When we surveyed 5,000 people in the U.S. earlier this year, we found that participants reported trusting news sites 3x more than social media.
To approach the idea of trust from a different angle, we also asked participants where they might expect to find a Fortune 500 company advertising. To that, 63% of participants answered on news sites.
If you’re thinking to yourself at this point, “okay, so news sites are trustworthy, but how do I actually go about getting my ads there?”, then look no further than native advertising.
We left off above with a question, and now let’s pick up with another one. Native advertising is the concept of creating ads that are so cohesive with the surrounding page content, assimilated into the design, and consistent with the platform behavior that the viewer feels the ad belongs there.
Simply put, native ads create an experience that feels cohesive rather than disruptive, something that’s especially important on news sites. This form of native advertising works for goals all across the marketing funnel, from awareness to performance marketing.
Advertisers gain the ability to reach the readers of tens of thousands of leading online publications where and when they’re most likely to be receptive to your message.
Before diving into native advertising, though, it’s important to take in some best practices, and that’s what we’ll really cover today.
There are a lot of elements that go into a successful native ad, but when they come together, the result is something truly incredible.
For images, try outdoor photos with people and no text
A look at image trends point to photos winning out over illustrations, people as the subject seeing more success than images without people, outdoor settings performing better than indoor, and the notion of the less text, the better.
When it comes to keywords, family is a high-performing trend
Based on these keywords, you’d want to try and include words like ‘daughter’ and ‘wife’ in your headlines, you may avoid ‘game’ and ‘health’, and you may venture to try out ‘humble’ and ‘pop’.
Given the above keyword trends, let’s try it out as if we were, say, a florist. We’ll test out the following five headlines in a title analyzing tool:
Let’s see how they shook out:
Ding, ding, ding, we have a winner. A More Attractive Garden in Seven Easy Steps is the one to go with here.
It’s not enough just to figure out a title and understand image trends – it’s about putting it all together.
To show you how all of the above trends could make their way into different advertising across different verticals, I’ve put together some examples that tie it all together.
The Taboola Trends tool does let you get more granular and identify trends specifically for each vertical, device type, location, etc., but for today’s purpose, let’s apply the general native advertising trends across the board.
Let’s say you’re a car company…
…or, how about you’re a gym?…
…or an electronics store.
The point is, the list goes on, and on, and on, and on. These trends are widely applicable, updated weekly, and can help you take your native ad performance to the next level.
A look at video trends points to male subjects in a winter setting, no human subjects if possible, no text, no animals, and color vs. black & white.
These trends are also available by vertical, platform, duration, and more so you can get granular with your video ads.
For this data and more, check out our weekly-updating Taboola Trends tool.
If you could get your message in front of people where they’re spending time and trusting the information they’re consuming, you’d do it, right? That’s the very reason why native advertising simply works.
In all advertising, context is key, but this is never more true than on news and publisher websites. You want your advertisement to feel organic in a person’s experience, to feel enticing, and to feel trustworthy. It’s also more important than ever in these settings to have ad creation driven by data and best practices that are tried and true.
If all of this sounds good to you, then it’s probably high time for you to start exploring how native ads can work for you. Taboola is always right here waiting to help you do exactly that.
Written by
Affise Academy
Affise is a partner marketing platform for brands, advertisers and agencies to scale via all possible performance marketing channels. Synergy of technology and our long standing experience lets you expand your partnerships, automate every step of the campaign lifecycle and make data-driven decisions.
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