The online advertising space is constantly evolving as advertising firms and web platforms shift and develop in ever-more sophisticated ways. During these shifts, a binary has developed between native adverts, which blend perfectly into the platform on which they’re hosted, and non-native adverts that don’t. Below, we’ll explore the key differences between native and non-native adverts and why there’s now a significant shift taking place for advertisers to make their adverts native rather than non-native.
Key Differences
Advertisements have traditionally appeared as banners or tiles on websites and other platforms on the internet. You’ll be familiar with these as you crawl the web – they pop up or load around the content that you sought to access, whether that’s on social media, on a search engine, or a specific web page.
These adverts can appear in two distinct ways. Non-native adverts are designed without regard for the place where they’ll be displayed. As such, the advertiser’s images, text, or graphics don’t match in style with the platform upon which they load. This tends to make for a jarring mismatch, drawing attention to the fact that the advert isn’t supported by the web page it’s on.
Alternatively, there is native digital advertising. These adverts are designed in order to match the images, graphics, and text on the website on which they’ll be hosted. It’s this visual conformity that makes native adverts appear more like part of the website and less like a panel that’s been superimposed over it.
Where They Appear
Both native and non-native adverts tend to appear on various platforms across the web. On social media, they’ll feature on the news feeds as you scroll through content. As you’ll be aware, the likes of Facebook and Twitter support native advertising in the sense that adverts on their platform match seamlessly with other content related to the people and pages that you follow.
Adverts also appear on the top and bottom banners of websites. Unless these websites are incredibly popular, with very high traffic, it’s more than likely that these adverts will be non-native. More popular websites, such as popular news outlets, may feature native adverts – the kind that blends in with the color scheme and font style of the publisher in question.
Finally, you’ll also see sponsored content and promoted adverts on e-commerce websites. For instance, when shopping on Amazon, you’ll be shown a set of identical product displays when you type in a search term. They appear the same, and only the product within the featured image will be different. Yet as you know, some of these product listings are, in fact, adverts – promoted by Amazon’s product boosting service. As such, there’s plenty of native advertising on e-commerce platforms.
Changing Requirements
So which method – native or non-native advertising – appears to have the upper hand as digital marketing develops into the 2020s? Due to changes in regulations around data privacy and third-party cookies, native advertising, including native video advertising, will likely come to dominate over its more popular cousin, non-native advertising.
There are some technical reasons for this, involving the certain data websites can share with advertisers and the traffic they can use as a selling point to potential advertising clients. But for advertisers, there’s a simpler explanation for why native advertising is set to rise: it simply looks better.
Visual Appearance
Looks aren’t everything in the digital marketing space, but they do count for a great deal when web users are flying around the web at speed, searching for the content that they wish to consume. Studies show that web users are now so used to banner adverts that they know to ignore them as they conduct their web surfing activities.
On the other hand, native advertising and native video advertising are less difficult to discern from the content that web users are actually looking for. It’s blended with the rest of the content so that when you scroll through a news story or search for products, your eye will be as drawn to the advert as it is to the content.
That’s the key reason that native advertising is experiencing a resurgence – if more eyes and attention are drawn to native adverts as opposed to non-native adverts, it’s clear which is the most effective for marketing products or services.
Going Native
If you’re interested in trying out native advertising and abandoning non-native advertising, get in touch with our digital advertising company to learn how we’d implement marketing campaigns that make the most of native advertising’s visual advantages. We’ll also be able to explain how we can use a website’s audience data to boost the success of your advertisements online.
