A native marketing campaign is essential to your overall business plan. Marketing campaigns are strategic moves and activities that help achieve your goals or key performance indicators (KPIs).
This is where native advertising plays a role.
Native advertising is the paid media or digital ads used within the marketing campaign that look, feel, and seamlessly fit into the platform being used. These ads blend together to integrate with the experience. There are usually three categories of native ads: search and promoted listings, content recommendations, and “In Feed” ads.
What Are Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)?
Key performance indicators are metrics used to track and measure progress within your defined goals and objectives based on the channel being used. While there are many different types of metrics in marketing, there are a few main KPIs crucial to your success:
- Click-through rate
- Conversion rate
- Viewable Impressions
- Bounce rate
What Do These KPIs Mean, And Why Are They Important?
We’re in a digital transformation that’s continuously evolving, where every week, there are new digital marketing trends, technologies, and ways of doing things. Getting to your ideal clients is important, but knowing how to get them to stay engaged can be challenging. These KPIs help give you the data you need.
Tracking your metrics is important, but what types of goals should you be looking at? Considering the type of business you have, it depends. For instance, you may want to increase your downloads in one campaign, drive sales in another, or build brand awareness to beef up your community. The goals you define help shape the types of campaigns and tactics you should use.
Measuring how your campaigns perform helps you stay on track. You’ll be able to assess where you aren’t spending enough, where you’re spending too much with no results, how your campaign is doing across your KPIs, and figure out which platforms give you the best return on investment (ROI). If you aren’t looking at the data, you’re not in control. Data helps you adjust and pivot when you need to.
Getting Into The KPIs
The four main KPIs we’ve discussed are click-through rate, conversion rate, viewable impressions, and bounce rate. Here’s why they are each uniquely important to your campaign’s success.
When using native ads, this is by far the most popular metric used to determine the performance of your campaign. This indicates the number of people who see your ads and those who take the time to click through. To calculate your CTR, you should take the total measured clicks, divide it by your total measured impressions, and multiply it by 100.
How will you define your CTR? Consider the audience. Your call to action is very important because it directs your audience to do “the thing.” Additionally, you want to make sure your ad has the right image and your title and copy are engaging enough to make them want to interact – don’t forget your keywords!
This shows the people who have seen your ad and done what you wanted them to do. You’re not building ads just to have people see them; the ultimate goal is a conversion where they complete an action. Your native ads should be directly tied to your conversions, but they don’t always have to be about spending money. If you have free content or want them to sign up for something, this is also considered a conversion.
Your conversion rate indicates how well you connect with your audience. You calculate this by dividing the total attributed conversions by the total number of clicks or visits and multiplying by 100. A good way to improve your conversion rates is to concentrate on certain things:
- Evaluate your language
- Create landing pages that speak to the call to action
- Run A/B tests on everything
- Develop great lead magnets
- Use social proof
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Viewable impressions
What is a viewable impression? If at least 50% of your ad is visible on screen for more than one second, that’s a viewable impression. This is not the same as page views because there must be an ad present. Understanding the impact of paid social media ads on these metrics can provide deeper insights into the effectiveness of your advertising strategies, helping you make more informed decisions. This metric helps you understand who is looking at your ads and where they are being seen. When combined with your click-through rate, you can better determine if you need to make changes.
A bounce rate is the number of people who have looked at your site but didn’t interact or engage on any level. This indicates the quality of your site and the quality of the traffic. High bounce rates indicate problems on your site, which could be for several reasons, including your load speed, you have the wrong audience, or something else.
Calculate the bounce rate by dividing the total number of visitors on the web page with no interactions by the number of visitors on the webpage and multiplying by 100.
What Does A Native Marketing Campaign Look Like?
A good example of a native ad is Land Rover’s Dragon Challenge video. While the brand is known for its content marketing campaigns, this takes things to another level, integrating everything naturally. It showcased what Land Rover is all about by scaling the steps to Heaven’s Gate landmark in China from a 45-degree angle. The ad was covered on their social networks, but because of the type of event it was, it created a native story of their brand essence.
Another good example is Pepsi and TikTok. With TikTok in over 155 countries, many different types of audiences can be reached to build brand awareness. Short-form video is one of the most popular ways to engage an audience, so building interactive ads gets many eyes and conversions for their products.
Additional metrics that may help in building campaigns include social sharing and cost per acquisition. To correctly set your KPIs, you must know what you want and have a roadmap that defines how you want to achieve them.
For instance, if your goal is to increase engagement, your KPIs should be tied to the number of downloads or signups you have for your newsletter or other content. If one of your goals is to build your brand awareness, your campaigns should have great CTAs that help get eyes on your information.
Being strategic is key when you write your business plan because it should coincide with the development of your native marketing campaign. A simple one-page business plan can sufficiently display how your native ad goals are tied to your marketing goals and must be monitored to determine effectiveness. While things may seem a bit confusing when getting started, taking time to assess what you need, why you need it, and how you’re going to get there is where it all comes together.
When done correctly, native ads have the potential to meet and exceed your goals. Be original, inspirational, and unique in creating your content to provide authentic, relatable experiences for your online audiences. Whether you’re using your ads as responsive display ads, remarketing ads, targeting specific audiences, video ads, or interstitial ads, you have many opportunities to get your content where you want it.
Native marketing campaigns are targeted and don’t disrupt the overall experience. Once you know where your audience shops, what they like to read, and the types of websites they visit, you’ll be able to create effective native marketing campaigns that drive leads and sales for business success using KPIs to steer you and your audiences in the right direction.
