Native ads vs display ads: what’s the difference?

Reliablecounter Team

Attracting traffic through display and native ad campaigns is a popular and reliable way to reach a new audience. In this article, we’ll talk about the features of these two advertisement methods.

 

Display ads features

Media ads are textual, video, audio and graphic ad content that is displayed on the media landscape. Media ads are commonly referred to online as display ads. 

Display ads main objective:

  • increasing brand popularity;
  • increasing traffic flow to a resource;
  • generating demand for new goods and services;
  • increasing sales;

 

Popular types of display ads:

Banners — small static or interactive ad units. Their advantages lie in their simplistic design and large audience coverage.

Popup (Popunder) — the user goes on the website, starts to look around, check out the content, and by clicking a specific area or the tab above (or below) it, there a new tab or window with the offer opens. With Pops, you can get a lot of cheap traffic, but it’s vital to properly set up the targeting settings, lest you fail to reach your target audience. 

Push-Notifications (including Mobile Push-up, On-Page Notifications) is a popular ad format that sends Push-Notifications to a user’s mobile device or desktop browser. When working with push notifications, it’s important to make sure the advertising network provides traffic free of bots and other types of fraud, like the Galaksion ad network. Otherwise, the advertiser may end up with low-quality traffic and low profit.

The advantages of this ad format: low traffic cost, only title, text, image required, large audience coverage.

Despite common criticism regarding media ad types and low traffic quality, these traffic sources remain relevant in 2021. There are several factors to consider to ensure a successful launch: choose a proven ad network to get the cleanest traffic, create unique, attractive creatives, select suitable offers, for example:

  • Push notifications are often used to drive traffic to E-commerce, Utilities, Nutra, Apps, Extensions, Sweepstakes, Dating, Finance;
  • Pops are great for the gambling and betting verticals, Utilities, Extensions, Apps, VPN, Sweepstakes, Games, Music and other.

Native ads features

Native ads are textual, video, or audio ads that are organically embedded into the surrounding content or information source placed on the site.

Popular native ads formats:

Sponsored content — content that besides useful info includes a link to an offer or mentions the promoted product or service. This type of advertising is popular among news, and information media outlets, and YouTube bloggers.

An expensive form of native advertising, usually used by brands with big budgets. Though, any offer is always worth testing.

Social media ads popular formats — video and textual content. Displayed in popular blogs. For example, a popular blogger subtly using a product or service in their show. Popular blogs also dedicate an article to some major problem and talk about resolving it with the promoted product or service. 

The advantages of this ad type lie in its low entry threshold, you can order inexpensive ads from bloggers with a small number of subscribers. If you choose the right blog, you gain access to your exact target audience.

Native ads in feeds. An ad designed to match the style of the rest of the website’s posts. When a user clicks on it, an ad banner opens and the former gets redirected to the advertiser’s website. A popular choice for websites with news feeds, online stores, aggregators and marketplaces. The advantage of this type is that it looks organic, doesn’t scare away visitors, and can’t be blocked.

Native ads emerged as a solution to “banner blindness” and ad blockers. Nowadays, advertising platforms are trying to integrate ad content in a way that would annoy users the least and look as organic as possible. Cheap traffic and a large choice of targeting settings allow you to reach your most relevant audience without draining your whole budget.

 

Which ad type is more effective: display or native?

It’s impossible to say which type is more effective. Experienced webmasters who know how to work with different types of display ads make serious profit on pops, pushes and banners. If you turn to the experience of large white-hat advertisers, you’ll see that they combine these two types of ad campaigns, which is a clear sign that these sources still generate decent revenue.

This all lets us conclude that the success of an ad campaign depends not on the chosen ad format but rather on how you work with it. 

Here are several tips for when launching ad campaigns:

  • Design unique and compelling creatives and test them extensively.
  • Update them occasionally so as not to cause banner blindness.
  • Conduct numerous audience targeting tests and identify the most relevant areas before launching an ad campaign.
  • Use tracking services for detailed analytics.
  • Work with proven ad networks that provide clean traffic without bots and markups.

 

These important aspects of launching successful ad campaigns are all covered by the Galaksion ad network. It also has a number of advantages compared to other CPA pricing model networks: a large database of free creatives, a wide selection of payment systems, built-in conversion tracking, the most effective ad formats, lots of popular GEOs, and an abundance of audience targeting settings. Any offer should be tested in as many formats as possible to find the most profitable bundle. SSP Galaksion lets you do that quickly and easily since it lets you create ad campaigns already in media and native formats.

In order to profit from native and display advertising, it is important to have a reliable partner such as Galaksion.