In-Feed Native Ads: Measuring Native Advertising

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As published by our chief digital officer, “Native advertising is a form of paid media where the advertisement is relevant to the consumer experience, integrated into the surrounding content and is not disruptive.” The advertisement is in-feed and is relevant to the content on the page. As CEO of a native advertising platform, I’m seeing the native advertising industry experience phenomenal growth, especially on mobile.

When introducing native to your marketing campaign, you need a clear view of what you want the results to be. In order to succeed with your in-feed native ads, you first need to define what success actually looks like. What is the metric you are going to use to determine whether or not your native advertising is a success? For the majority of in-feed native advertising campaigns, key performance indicators (KPIs) typically fall into one or more of the below:

CTR: Click-through rates (CTRs) are often used as a KPI, particularly when it comes to programmatic native advertising.

Visits: Rightly or wrongly for many advertisers, the No. 1 criteria for success when they run native advertising campaigns is: How many visits did it bring to my site?

Dwell Time And Bounce Rate: These two KPIs often go hand in hand with visits as a measure of success. Dwell time is the measure of how long a visitor spends on a specific page, so it can be used — in a slightly crude fashion — as an indicator of whether someone read and enjoyed the content on the page.

Bounce rate, which is a key search metric, is the indication of what the user did after landing on the page. Did they click back or close the window, or was their interest piqued enough by this page to move along to other pages on the site? Both are metrics used to understand the stickiness of content and websites, and to tell if visitors enjoy these pages.