Everything You Need to Know About Native Ads – Guest Post by MGID

Let’s start with the basics: What are native ads and native advertising? 

Native advertising features paid ads that organically fit into the design and form of a website. These ad units are usually marked as “Sponsored content”, “Recommended by”, etc.  Native ads always represent an organic flow of information and generate a higher CTR. Since the widgets do not look like old banner ads, they are seen as a cure for “banner blindness“.

How to create converting native ads? The advertiser needs to focus on successful, non-aggressive teasers. His advertorial landing pages should be full of engaging content, and the tone of the voice should be tailor-made for the target audience. This way, the user won’t reject the advertisement. As native ads are all about telling a story, the user may even enjoy it. 

Why bet on native ads?

Native advertising is a performance-driven technology. Why it’s worth to advertise your products through native advertising? The answer is: ROI way better than for standard ad formats. But if you decide to try it out, be prepared for the fact that you will not receive a 300% ROI from spending $100. Native ads are a reliable long-term tool when you are ready to invest decent budgets.

In general, incredible success stories when you invested $100 and earned $1000 are legends that go to the internet marketers community. And most often these cases are connected with traffic source rules violation.

However, Internet marketing, particularly, affiliate marketing in 2019, is no longer easy money and parties. Over the past 5 years, we have seen a serious transformation, the desire and intention to play by the rules and under the same conditions, avoiding forbidden practices. More and more teams and companies are building strategies that will work for a long time. MGID has been around for 11 years, and we are proud that a number of our users have traveled this path with us. 

Native traffic from MGID 

MGID gets 1.5M clicks daily in Europe, 1.7M clicks in Latin America, 870k clicks in North America and 5M clicks in Asia-Pacific. Although the device type distribution varies from country to country, we observe that on average mobiles dominate with 72%, then desktop (26%) and tablet (2%).

What makes MGID so outstanding? We primarily focus on optimization tools and anti-fraud solutions.

Traffic Insights

Traffic insights – is the almanac of the traffic structure in the GEO section, which shows you hot opportunities, low competition, and best-performing GEOs. By studying these sections, you can predict the budget needed for testing and optimization, and avoid running your campaigns blindfolded. You can find Traffic insights when creating a new campaign.

You can also see daily impressions by GEO, traffic type, and average CPC. If you want to create a campaign with your favorite targeting – just click Add Campaign right there.

Selective Bidding

To comprehend the convenience of Selective Bidding, let us say a few words about the optimization strategy in MGID. In general, we always advice putting a bid above the average CPC at the beginning of the campaign in order to pick up the best impressions. How can you find out the average CPC? Ask your manager – this is the first person in MGID who should be contacted for any questions.

Based on the collected data, you should take the first steps of optimization, disabling those sources that did not bring you conversions. To do this, we used Selective Bidding – you can manually increase/decrease the rate for a specific site.

Important! Before you disable the subdomain entirely, you need to check other domains too, because among them you may find those that still brought some conversions. When the campaign is working smoothly with high results, it is better to keep working without any changes; otherwise, it could result in traffic volumes decrease.

Besides, soon, the ‘zip code’ and ‘interests targeting’ functions will also appear in the MGID dashboard. So if you know who is interested in your product, you will have a chance to increase conversions by targeting people with specific interests or location. It will benefit a lot as income levels may significantly vary between regions and districts. For instance, the NSDP per capita reached $5,700 in Goa while it stood at $2,700 in Maharashtra state.

Finally, MGID has achieved the “Certified Against Fraud’ Seal – thanks to their proprietary anti-fraud system and 3rd-party anti-fraud tool ‘Anura’, which is the most reliable bot detection tool today.

What verticals work best? 

Dating

340 Million people all over the world use online dating. Most of them are interested in relationships (84%), then looking for a friend (43%) and, lastly, sex (24%). The industry is expected to generate over US$1,667m in 2019 with a growth rate of 4.2%.

Nowadays there are around 2,000 dating services in the USA and approximately 8,000 around the world. They include local dating apps and websites, international dating websites, dating for single parents, for rich guys, vegans, LGBTQ+, etc.

In addition, the dating vertical is subdivided into mainstream, casual, and adult. The goal of mainstream dating is to find relationships. Casual and adult is for people who are looking for sex, webcam models or video chats. There are plenty of options, so find the best one and test it.

Pro insight: MGID’s top three best-performing GEOs for dating are: India, the United Kingdom, and Vietnam.

Now let’s consider which creatives work best for dating. Data proves that real-looking women matching the beauty standards of a particular country have higher CTR. Men also like girls with tattoos.

Nutraceuticals 

Nutraceuticals, commonly called “nutra”, are health & beauty products, namely skin care products, weight-loss, vitamins, performance boosters, testosterone boosters, male enhancement supplements, and brain pills.

Asia is one of the best-performing regions as it provides affiliate marketers with high traffic volumes at cheaper costs. Europe also has sufficient demand for health & beauty products, especially skin care and weight loss.

Pro tip: Test nutraceutical offers in India, Thailand, the Czech Republic, and Italy. 

Gambling

Online gambling is also a large industry that is expected to reach $94.4 billion by 2024. Between 2018 and 2024, the market is going to grow at GAGR of approximately 10.9% (Globe Newswire).

Gambling includes online casino, poker, blackjack, slot machines, roulette, baccarat, craps, bingo, and social casino. The social casino is about players buying in-game currency to play. In the end, they cannot exchange the in-game currency for real money or withdraw their earnings.

Pro insight: Most of the players, your potential targets, are located in Europe, Asia, and North America.

Landing pages with a storytelling approach perform very well. Usually, this is a success story about a man who finds a profitable scheme and uses it to beat the casino…

What do you need to know about moderation at MGID?

To avoid making mistakes and save you time and nerves during the moderation, we suggest reading the following short list of prohibited content and products very carefully: dating services facilitating sexual encounters, exploitation or endangerment of minors, high-risk investments or impossible get-rich-quick schemes, Illicit or digital drugs, misleading, inaccurate, or deceitful information, pornography or erotica, products or services claiming to predict the future, terrorism, tobacco or nicotine, unauthorized celebrity endorsements, violating third party rights, weapons and explosives. These are all prohibited at MGID. You can check out MGID Guidelines right here – https://www.mgid.com/content-guidelines.

Super pro tip: Create teasers of different categories. It is important to know that after submitting your creatives, your campaign will be rated PG, R, NC-17, NSFW, according to which your teasers will be placed on particular publishers.

Most of the top publishers do not allow NC17 and NSFW teasers to maintain the appropriate appearance of the website. Moreover, It is a simple fact, that NC17 and NSFW campaigns will bring you more clicks, but not all of them will lead to actions. By creating PG 13 and R teasers, you can increase not only impression rate but also conversions. It’s better not to rely on explicit and shocking pictures, but instead design high-quality and creative teasers to reach premium websites.

Please note that if you are using a landing page in your funnel, then it must also be aligned with the teaser category.

Native ads are non-intrusive. You must understand that success can be achieved only through well-designed landing pages, sufficient a/b testing, and respectful attitude towards the audience.

How to create successful campaigns with MGID? Create engaging content, constantly optimize your campaigns, and follow the rules of the platform.

It would be best if you also understand the audience and keep testing different approaches. For newbies, we suggest looking at spy tools, which will help to facilitate the process of content creation. But remember that you should not just copy, it’s always better to create something new and original, as being native ads are all about creating a unique story.