How to Measure Native Advertising Effectiveness? The Metrics That Matter
Native advertising has nurtured a new relationship between publisher and advertiser, in which the publisher wants the advertiser to succeed, in order to monetize from native ads and to provide readers more quality content that would help increase web traffic.
Native ads tend to be paid or sponsored content that look like the rest of the website content. Sometimes they are listed as block of “you might be also interested” grid of links that seem to go to other websites. They are quite different to traditional banner or display ads, hence content metrics should be employed when measuring the effectiveness of native ads.
Publishers and agencies would argue that different clients and different campaign objectives call for different metrics. Traditional metrics such as click-through rate and cost per impression are important for publishers to measure the value and the efficiency of native ads. Yet the following metrics suggested by a Copy Press article may help analyze the quality and effectiveness of native ads content.
Pageviews
Pageview is one of the most used metrics leveraged by publishers for branded content when reporting campaign success to clients. 95 percent of premium publishers agreed to that view is the primary success metric, whether it is pageviews for written content or video views for branded video.
Time Spent
Native ads are integrated into site design and they look like any other piece of content. Hence the longer the readers spent on engaging with the branded content, proving that its effectiveness to brands and a significant revenue opportunity for publishers.
Social Shares and Referrals Traffic
Social networks tend to generate the most traffic to websites. This is simply because social shares spread native ads content on a higher level and it provides value to the branded content. The more social shares by readers, the higher is the referrals traffic coming to the site.
Demographics
Native ads are treated like pieces of editorial, hence it should be created specifically for a particular audience type. It is worthwhile to figure out who is the target audience and then evaluate whether the traffic meet the demographic needs after the native ad has launched. It is important that the native ad is delivered to the ideal audience.
Brand Lift
According to ANA’s survey, brand lift is considered by publishers as one of the most effective metrics for measuring native ads. However not all publishers consistently measure brand metrics as there are no standardized method to do so. The majority of publishers would employ third-party audience surveys or leverage in-house audience survey tools as means for measuring brand lift.
Key Takeaway
The fact that native advertising can be measured with traditional quantitative metrics, but marketers should take into consideration of content metrics also in order to measure the actual effectiveness of native ads.
