15+ TOP Native Advertising Platforms [2024] — Best Native Ad Networks
Getting good traffic on your blog is pretty important when you’re doing affiliate marketing. There are a lot of ways to make this happen, such as advertising on social media, websites, etc. But everyday less and less people actually click and buy into these ads. This is where native ads come to the rescue. In this article we will tell you how marketing your blog through native ads can increase your odds of success, and why you should think about doing it right now.
What Are Native Advertising and Their Benefits
Native Ads are essentially regular ads, except they are designed to not look like an ad. Now, you might think this is counterintuitive. How does that exactly work? If your ad doesn’t look like an ad, how do you get people to click on it? Well, that’s exactly the secret behind Native Advertising. It doesn’t break the flow or disrupt the webpage. People don’t like ads to get in their face or interrupt them. This is why Native Advertising exists.
The biggest advantage of native advertising is that it won’t drive away potential customers. Native Ads in a way camouflage perfectly with the content, making them seem like they’re not advertisements. This is to their advantage, since it will get people to click on them more easily. Imagine you’re swiping through Pinterest or Twitter and you see an article throughout the content. You might not notice, but these are native ads, and they’ll get people to click on them exactly because they don’t look like ads.
That isn’t all. Native ads are also less expensive than other methods of advertising. The average CPC (cost-per-click) for native ads can go as low as $0.6. Moreover, because of the variety of platforms that provide native advertising services, they can generally be less restrictive than ads on popular websites. If a platform is giving you a bad deal, you can always go to another. And plus as long as you follow the guidelines you should be fine.
How Does Native Advertising Work for Affiliates
Affiliate marketers can benefit greatly from native advertising. However, if you’re not already experienced in the field, it can be difficult to know how to start. Here’s a couple of ways you can do use native advertising in your advantage as an affiliate marketer:
In order to share your affiliate links and get people to click on them, first you need a reader base on your blog. This is one of the ways you can use native advertising to your advantage as an affiliate marketer. Just make sure you have your affiliate links in your content. And don’t forget you’re running native advertisements, so it’s important to make sure your ads are inviting and friendly. Native ads don’t need an air of professionalism to them. You just have to make sure it’s engaging enough to make people want to click on it.
- Gain Traffic for Your Website
Indeed, you don’t have to limit yourself to blog posts and plastering them with various affiliate links. If you get people to come back with quality content, they’ll be a very useful asset for your business. An audience is always the most important asset to a successful affiliate marketer, and you should not take it lightly. You might get a lot of people to click on affiliate links through advertised blog posts, but doing this alone wouldn’t be sustainable in the long run. A good traffic for your website means your income doesn’t have to rely on advertising.
This is one of the other smart things you can do with native advertising. Set up an email subscription service, and make sure the audience has a reason to drop their email. You can’t expect the audience to give you the benefit of doubt. Promise exciting stories, new updates, etc. When you’ve successfully built an email list for yourself, you can promote more affiliate offers to them through email subscription. Again, it’s always important to show tact when sending emails containing affiliate links to your subscriptors. If you fail to do that, your hard earned audience can be lost as quickly and easily.
Costs and Profits
Don’t forget you are running a business here. Whatever money you invest on your ads should expect some return, otherwise your business isn’t really successful. In order to succeed in native advertising, you must take into consideration how much each platform charges for ads.
Pricing Models
Generally, most platforms charge via CPM and CPC pricing models, and the maximum CPM rate sits at around $2. They will also have a minimum payment threshold, which means you can’t order ads below that amount.
You should also know there are three tiers of countries you can place your ads in. Tier one countries, such as the United States or Uk, are the wealthiest and most competitive, usually being the most profitable. Tier two countries are less competitive and have a lower average income per person. China, Mexico, or Saudi Arabia are among tier 2 counties. Tier 3 countries in the end are the developing ones, and its consumers have low purchase power. Bahrain or India are two examples of tier 3 counties.
Also important to note that some countries, or GEOs, can be more profitable to Native Advertising. For example, 50% of traffic on Native Advertising platforms comes from tier 1 GEOs like the United States, United Kingdom, Japan, and France. Usually the US, Germany and France are in top GEOS on different platforms.
Now whatever GEO or platform you’re going to target, it’s important that you make sure to earn more than you spend. This is called Return on Investment (ROI). You must always strive for a higher ROI, and it isn’t particularly hard to reach if you remember a few guidelines.
How to Know My Ads Are Working
There are some metrics you need to get familiar with before you jump right onto having your ads run on websites. To measure how effective your ads are, pay attention to the following standards in advertisement.
- Click-Through-Rate (CTR). This metric is supposed to show the attractiveness of your ads, and simply put, it refers to the percentage of people who end up clicking on your ad (out of all the people who saw it). What is a good CTR? For native ads, anything around 0.5% is good. Even though this amount will change on different devices, on average, you want to try to have it more than 0.2%.
- Conversion Rate. This metric refers to the percentage of people who were converted to a customer as a visitor. Anyone who clicks on your ad and actually ends up signing up on your website or following an affiliate link or subscribing to your mail list is considered a conversion here. So a click here is not enough, but an engagement. A Conversion rate of more than 2% is good, but you can definitely get it even higher with some creatives. There is literally no limit to this.
- ROI (Return on Investment). A return on investment is supposed to indicate how much money you earned from a business you invested in. Essentially, for promoting your affiliate website or product on a native ad network, you need to spend some money, and the amount of money you’ll be earning from all the users you gained, is the return you’ll have. What’s a good ROI? Let’s say a 0% ROI means you haven’t gained or lost anything. You’ve gotten a return exactly equal to the money you spent. Anything above that is considered good, so a 20% ROI means you have 100% of your investment back, plus 20% more.
Now depending on your industry or your niche, you could be calculating the amount of money you’re earning per click or per visit differently. Sometimes, you’re paying the ad network based on clicks and you’re also earning from those clicks, and other times, you’re paying per visit and you’re getting paid based on clicks. Make sure the payment model you are choosing matches what you’re earning from your affiliate business.
Set Goals
One of the smarter things you can do is setting goals and trying to reach them. For example, say you want to try native advertising using Taboola. The average cost of advertising per click could go up to $0.1 per click. This means with a budget of $200, you will get 2 000 clicks. If you manage to earn at least $250 with this amount, that’s a 25% ROI on your budget. You can set goals such as these according to your budget, and try to reach them.
Choose Profitable Niches
Of course it’s clear as the day, even if it might not immediately come to your mind. The more thriving and alive a niche is, the more profit is going to be made. It’s simple logic. Before you even start advertising, it’s smart to do some research and find out what niches are profitable now, and will respond well to affiliate marketing.
Some of the best niches for promoting products and services in 2022 include online dating, gambling, finance, beauty, home security, and e-sports. Even though you really want to focus on your own niche and try to find publisher websites that have the potential of bringing customers to your affiliate website, it wouldn’t hurt to set your expectations when dealing with niches. Make sure to check out the list of the most profitable niches in affiliate marketing.
Tips for Successfully Selling Affiliate Products with Native Ads
It’s true that native ads are more effective than some other types of ads, but you really want to make sure you’re getting the most out of your native ad campaigns. Here are some tips to really pay attention to before you get started.
Choose your Ad Network Wisely
There are many great native advertising campaigns out there, as mentioned here on page too. However, not all of them might be your cup of tea. If you are working on a specific niche, make sure you use networks that target the audience you are looking for. There are many publishers out there and not all of them have the visitors you need. So if your affiliate business is on beauty products, you really don’t want to advertise your content on a publisher website about cars. Try to use ad networks that understand this and allow you to optimize your target audience.
Benefit from Creatives
There are so many ways to make your native ads more effective. Even though, unlike display ads, native ads can’t be configured to a high extent, you can still add some tricks like good CTAs, attractive visuals, and sometimes, even animations into them. You could always make your ads irresistible, so readers or visitors would want to follow up and see what your content is all about. Take a look at the example below. You have definitely seen some of these ads yourself and got curious for a second. These are good examples of optimizing your ads with creatives. You can always get creative with different devices as well.
Test Your Campaign Performance
It’s not the wisest to start your campaign and just keep running it. For the first 2 weeks, try to monitor your campaigns. Sometimes, your ads are not looking as effective as you thought they would be. In that case, change your strategies, change your network, use different positionings, and think of new ways to incorporate native ads into different publisher sites. You could save lots of money if you only aim to test for a while till you get a hang of it and make sure you’ve found the most profitable way of advertising your content.
Target the Right Audience
Mentioned before in a few headings above, but this time, we are reminding you to take a close look into what type of audience you have. If you are promoting your affiliate business for the gambling niche, you might want to focus on mobile users rather than desktop users. You might also want to check the GEOs you are focusing on. This will help you keep your criteria in line, especially when choosing your ad network.
Conclusion
Native ads are an amazing way to advertise your content in a stealthy and smooth way. Display ads have a reputation of repelling the audience, but native ads have proven to actually be enjoyed by users. So, take your chances in this field, and don’t forget you could always focus on free social-media native traffic like Twitter hashtags and Pinterest as well. Even though they might not be as effective, you will get the presence you need.
