Why My Campaigns Don’t Work: The 9 Most Common Mistakes We Make in Native Advertising

You launched the first native campaign. But something went wrong. Instead of getting a lot of new customers and generating thousands of clicks, no one reacts to your ad. Have you been fooled about the effectiveness of your native ad? What if native advertising doesn’t suit you?

Native advertising, just like any other marketing technique, is only effective when done properly. There are many factors to consider when creating a campaign, including audience analysis, brand messaging, goal setting, and more. It’s no surprise that you simply overlooked something crucial. Negative results probably only mean that you need to correct a few mistakes in the native ad that you made.

In this post, we will describe 9 mistakes that affect your campaigns and tell you how to solve them.

You have not chosen a good platform for native advertising

Choosing a platform for native advertising is one of the most important steps that will affect the success of your campaigns. One of the first things to check when you notice that native advertising isn’t delivering good results, is whether your platform really fits your goals and whether it reaches your target audience.

Sometimes it seems to us that popular native advertising platforms, which work with different publishers around the world, are a safe choice for everyone. However, smaller native advertising platforms could be a better choice for small businesses or in certain industries.

If you have or work for a small business, it is often better to target primarily clients from your country or in our case the region. That’s why Native Media is a great choice for you.

Also, the native advertising platform should work with relevant publishers. Which are specific to your industry, consider platforms that partner with publishers who focus on these topics.

Native ads are not engaged

In case you want your native ads to receive more clicks, you should revise the ads themselves. It may sound like a cliché, but judging by most native ads, only a few advertisers know how to create good ads.

There is no universal structure when it comes to creating native ads. You should know that audience preferences can vary depending on many factors. Trends, cultures, languages, industry – you have to consider everything before you make your own native ad.

For example, for financial, black and white images have a 140% higher clickthrough rate. In contrast, for the pet category, color images perform better than black and white photos.

You are not promoting quality content

What if you have a decent CTR but poor user behavior indicators? There may be various reasons for this problem, and we will describe them.

Native advertising is not only about ads, but also about quality content. What happens when a person clicks on your ad? Do you encourage them to stay on your site? Are they disappointed and leave the site?

Unlike banners, native advertising is considered more credible because of the value it offers.

Great content can help you turn website visitors into customers, while unwanted content will undoubtedly damage the credibility of your brand.

To run successful native advertising campaigns, you need to set quality and relevant content to your target audience. Do you want to promote articles that have already been published on your blog? Then ask yourself, “Why would people who hadn’t heard of my brand before want to know more about it now?” Will you be creating new content for your new campaign? Don’t forget to do an audience survey before you even get to this topic.

Native ad titles are not relevant to the content they promote

Lack of correspondence between headlines and content is a common mistake for beginners in native advertising.

Creating effective native ads is great, but more importantly, your ad title matches the content they promote.

Have you ever clicked on an incredibly promising title to find out that the article has nothing to do with the title it has? That’s what we’re talking about.

The same thing could have happened with your campaign. If you overdid it by trying to create an interesting ad, your efforts could have simply turn against you. Your ad has a likeable title, but the content doesn’t match the title. This will surely frustrate visitors.

If this is a problem, you need to look at your headlines again. Let them reflect the content that the ads lead to and that will be interesting enough to grab the attention of your audience. Try to be more specific. Can you mention the numbers? Do that. Exactly how much will your audience benefit from reading this content?

You are neglecting the customer journey

A native ad is not a typical ad that aims to bring your target audience to a landing page that invites visitors to convert. In most cases, native advertising is just the beginning of a close relationship between consumers and the brand.

Understanding customer journey is just as important as choosing the right targeting options.

For your content marketing to succeed, align your marketing efforts with the customer’s journey.

These are the phases that your customer goes through on the journey to purchase. Create content that will help you attract their attention and nurture them at any stage.

Customer journey phases:

• Consideration – “My brand has not become recognizable for a long time. I think it’s the right time to rethink my marketing plan and find an alternative, because there is always an alternative. “
• Awareness – “I learn that there is a great type of ad for my brand to finally become recognizable – it’s called native advertising!”
• Decision – “Since I have no experience with native advertising, I decide to find someone to run the campaign and place it on the Native Media platform.

You can’t expect people to want to buy your brand right away, seeing your native ad. If you are targeting a new audience, offer them content that will introduce them to the topic. Make it interesting. If you’re re-targeting an audience that visits your site, go with content that will bring them closer to your purchase.

You did not align the KPIs with your goals

When you start a new campaign, you first define your goals. When your campaign is active, you define KPIs to help you monitor your campaign performance. If you don’t choose the right performance indicators for native advertising, it’s not unexpected that the results don’t meet your expectations.

Is your campaign geared towards brand building? You’ll then need to monitor visible impressions, clicks, behaviors, but not conversions.

You don’t consider customer journey part of your marketing strategy

Since the customer’s journey is not as simple as we would like, you can’t just give all the credit for the conversion to the last click. If your customer converts after opening your email newsletter, it would be fair enough to consider the other steps that preceded this action. Last-click solutions would not be as effective without tools that grab users’ attention.

When your campaign is focused on driving conversions, the effectiveness of native advertising should not be measured separately, but as part of your marketing strategy. You need to direct customers towards the sales funnel.

You did not do campaign testing

How do you know what works and what doesn’t? Test it!

Without testing, you can’t reach the full potential of your campaigns. Testing will allow you to focus on the best fragments and stop using fragments that do not work.

Test the following parts of a native ad:

• Ad formats
• Titles and photos
• Types of content
• The audience
• Publishers

Choose a time and monitor key metrics to determine which option has the most impact. Remember to test only one variation at a time so you can know for sure what caused the difference.

You are not checking where your clicks are coming from

You may spend your entire budget on clicks from publisher websites that will never give you a conversion.

What happens to traffic coming from certain websites? Are you making conversions? If you notice thousands of potential customers coming from a completely irrelevant website that is unlikely to ever become your customer, you need to look at your targeting options again.

Check your campaigns

These are key aspects that can affect the performance of your campaign. Avoid these mistakes and follow our tips to increase the effectiveness of native advertising for your brand.

Check your campaigns while they’re active. By analyzing this data, you will be able to make the necessary changes to your current campaigns and take advantage of new advertising.

Now all you have to do is register as an advertiser on the Native Media platform, by clicking the HERE button. If something is not clear to you yet or you have a question, there is chat support in the lower right corner.