A guide to good optimization of a native ad campaign

To achieve your goals with native advertising, it is not enough just to create an ad and place it on one of the platforms for native advertising. Monitoring, testing, and ongoing optimization are vital for building any successfully paid campaign, even a native ad.

Before you start optimizing your native ad campaign, you need to check your statistics daily and start making changes. From the first day, you start with optimization, because that’s the only way to reduce your costs to a minimum and get the most out of native advertising.

In this post, we will show you how to identify problems when you run a campaign and how to solve them. No kidding, we will reveal all the secrets to you.

YOU NEED TO HAVE A CLEAR GOAL

To clearly assess the performance of native advertising, you need to define tracking metrics. Depending on the goals of the campaign, these metrics will vary. Don’t worry, this is nothing complicated. Anyone can master the metrics of ad tracking and learn to read it correctly.

Ask yourself, are you running native ads to increase traffic to your site, or perhaps to reach new customers? No matter what your goal is, be prepared that you will have to take different steps during optimization.

When the goal of your campaign is to increase traffic, then you need to track all clicks on the ad, as well as other metrics of audience behavior, such as the percentage of homepage abandonment, average retention, etc.

Campaigns aimed at creating leads or sales are evaluated using the following metrics: CTR (rate per click), conversions, CVR (conversion rate), and CPA (cost per share).

CPA is the most important measure. It determines the effectiveness of paid campaigns. Before you can run a new campaign, you need to set a target CPA – how much you’re willing to pay per action. By measuring and improving your CTR and CVR, you will eventually be able to achieve your target CPA.

HOW TO APPROACH NATIVE ADVERTISING

Goal: More traffic

The optimization process for campaigns aimed at attracting traffic will be different from the process for campaigns aimed at executing a sales action. Let’s start by listing the most common and simplest problems and move on to more complex ones.

Number 1: Too few impressions

You have placed an ad, however, there are very few views and clicks. What’s wrong with your ad?

It is possible that your cost-per-click is too low, so your ads are not sufficiently visible and competitive with other ads. Increase your bids and monitor how this affects your campaign performance. If your budget is being spent on speed, gradually reduce your cost-per-click.

Don’t forget to adjust your budget, if necessary – it can happen that with higher prices per click, your daily budget is spent too quickly.

Number 2: High number of impressions and low CTR

Note: What exactly is a low clickthrough rate? To give you a better idea of what to expect from your native ad campaigns, we’ve gathered all the Native Media standards for 7 major industries in one place. Check these benchmarks to find out the average CTR in your industry, which days and hours your ads can deliver the best results, and more.

These are some of the most common problems that advertisers face. The reasons for this can be multiple, and we will try to list the most important ones:

1. Wrong audience

Your ads are viewed by thousands of people, but most of them are not interested in the same ad. Then you must be targeting the wrong people.

Native Media’s advanced targeting options will help you overcome this problem. It’s always better to start with a larger audience, especially if you want to drive traffic to your site. Once you start getting a decent number of clicks, you can start narrowing your reach to improve traffic quality.

2. Ads

The next reason your ads don’t accrue clicks is because there may be something wrong with the ads themselves.

So, if your CTR is low even though it has a lot of impressions, test completely different ads: choose better thumbnails, come up with more appealing titles, and use terms that attract attention.

Note: To identify the problem, test different titles and images in separate campaigns. By testing new ads with unchanged targeting options, you’ll know which changes are affecting your campaign performance. If the tests don’t work well, try combining new ads and targeting to see which combination works better.

3. Contents

You may have tested all the titles and nothing works. Are you sure the content of the campaign is compelling enough? In addition to ads, ad placement, and targeting options, you need to test different types of content.

If you want people to click on your ad and stay on your site, make them see value in your message. The audience does not want to read about your brand and its benefits, but wants stories, free guides or funny videos. Give them what they want. Give them a solution to one of their problems or teach them something useful. Tell them the best story ever.

Number 3: Bad user behavior

You don’t need poor quality traffic, do you? No one wants to immediately spend a campaign budget on those who click on an ad for no reason. Here’s how to avoid it:

Make sure your ad headlines describe what you’re really offering. Use precise and descriptive titles.
Test different content formats. Include videos on landing pages, create content in a longer format but to be viewed, use good infographics, etc.
Use conversion tracking tools (for example: Red track). It will help you discover websites that do not bring you results. Through the filtering option, it is possible to add site IDs to the white or blacklist.
Optimize ads and landing pages for mobile devices. Are you sure your sales page is clearly visible on smartphones?

Goal: Conversions

When your goal is to build leads or sales, achieving a decent clickthrough rate is just the beginning of a long optimization process toward achieving your actual goals.

Number 1: Low CVR

You will need to check this when your CVR (conversion rate) does not meet your expectations:
Make sure the link to your landing page is correct.
If you are dealing with click-bait titles, you run the risk of spending your budget on an irrelevant audience.
Is the content of the landing page convincing enough?
Be sure to test different types of content and designs that can positively impact conversion rates.
Do you attract the wrong audience with your messages?
People who click on your ads may simply be irrelevant to your offer.

To avoid getting clicks from people who aren’t in your target audience, try optimizing your campaign with filters on our platform.

Are there certain publishers that generate many clicks?

It is also possible that your ads may appear on inadequate websites. Check the performance of your campaign at the website or publisher level and filter out those that attract irrelevant audiences.

First, review your overall performance data and look for sites that don’t add results. Blacklist them on your account. You can also eliminate sites that have very few conversions.

Number 2: High CVR, but low number of conversions

High clickthrough rates don’t always mean you get a lot of conversions. Here are two common reasons for this problem:

Your cost-per-click bid is too high. As a result, you get too many impressions, and your ad is shown to an irrelevant audience. When you see that certain campaigns, ads, or placement destinations aren’t converting as much as you imagined, your budget is being spent relatively quickly, so don’t hesitate to start reducing your cost-per-click by 10%. This should help you optimize your budget and show your ads only to the audience that is interested in them.
Your CTR is low. Your ads just don’t appeal to people. To solve this problem, test different titles and images.

Number 3: High CPA

Your main goal is to encourage as many potential buyers or sales as possible at the lowest cost. So how do you reach your target cost per conversion?

Your cost-per-conversion is the cost of your campaign divided by the number of conversions. The more conversions you get with clicks, the lower your cost per conversion. Unlike traffic-generating campaigns, conversion-oriented ones aren’t geared toward more clicks and longer sessions. Ideally, they should attract people who will most likely act immediately. When you optimize your campaigns with this in mind, you’ll get more conversions for lower costs.

We will now go through the steps you should take to reduce your cost per conversion.

Note: To improve your advertising cost recovery for native ad campaigns, change the quantity for quality. If you think you need to make adjustments that will result in fewer clicks but will improve your CVR, go for it.

Step 1: Decrease your CPC

Are there any campaigns, ads, or display sites that perform well in every way except cost-per-conversion? This is a real sign of lowering the cost per click.

Step 2: Narrow or split targeting

If you’ve targeted multiple countries in one campaign, split them. You may find that some of the sites you included earlier are not as effective as the others.

For example, some advertisers target countries that speak one language in one campaign. But even though people in the UK and Australia speak English, they won’t behave similarly to the content of your campaign. They represent cultures that have different needs and priorities due to the peculiarities of their climatic zones, history, etc. Moreover, people from different regions within one state will behave differently. If you haven’t already done so, be more precise with your targeting to see which audience is holding you back.

Once you identify countries that generate little or no sales, exclude them and focus on the most efficient locations.

Step 3: Divide campaigns by device

We hope you’re already running separate campaigns for mobile and PC users, but if you haven’t… you should do so as soon as possible. The behavior of users on a mobile device is different from the behavior of a computer.

Step 4: Edit the landing pages

Create new testing campaigns using different colors, messages, and images on landing pages. Run A / B tests to see how different versions work for your audience.

When creating a new landing page, always make sure that it is easy to perform an action through it. By requiring visitors to fill out a form that opens on a new tab or contact you via email (instead of having a contact form), you lose a lot of potential customers who don’t want to spend a lot of time fulfilling your requirements.

Get optimized for your ad today. Launch an ad campaign on the best platform in the Balkans by clicking the HERE button. If you have any questions or something is not clear in the lower right corner, you have chat support.