What is Product Market Fit on Native Ads?
The foundation of native ads is offering a product that works. The first question to ask is are you selling a solution? If you are selling a nice-to-have item, it will be more challenging to generate interest and demand. When selling a solution, you can present users a problem, and then give a solution to mitigate the problem and why they should be making a purchase.
Be aware of price, perceived value and the target audience. It’s easy to sell car insurance, but it’s difficult to sell a yacht. Why? Because the total addressable market (TAM) is small as there are not a lot of people that can afford a yacht. There are many people who can afford basic car insurance.
Question: do you have a product that works? Is it at a price point that is achievable?
Most products and services that work on Native ad platforms fall within an achievable spectrum. An easy product could translate to a lower price point and higher competition. A more difficult product could translate to a higher price point with lower competition. Example of a difficult product includes a lower-end point and shoot camera vs high-end DSLR camera. The point and shoot camera is easier to sell but doesn’t mean that the more expensive product is impossible. It will just likely take more money to sell.
Testing Budget: 20x CPA target is a good starting point to test on Taboola, Outbrain, or Yahoo
Common Problem: Campaign offer works on Facebook or TikTok but doesn’t convert on Native. Come up with creative ways to find people to develop interest in the product.
What is the Best Target Audience on Native Ads?
Broad targeting works best! Don’t select or narrow the right audiences, reach them through ad creatives. Native ad platform is a CPM based network and publishers want to make money with maximum impressions. If the ad CTR is high with a relevant ad, chances are that the platform will find relevant people. Segment the users that you are trying to sell to at the ad level and then make the sell.
Example: if you are trying to sell a solution to a problem, make sure the ad presents the problem and NOT the solution. The ad CTR will suffer when showing the solution and you are going to paying much more for a relevant click.
Example Headline: People born between 19XX and 19XX = great way to segment the native audience!
Once you’ve segmented and defined the people you want to reach, sell through content!
Why is Content Important on Native Ads?
Content is how to take a cold click and generate interest and making it warm.
Serve content around the idea that you have and the segment that you’ve identified.
Avoid selling right out of the gates!
- Header that connects to the ad
- Image to peak interest
- Intro with problem
- Explanation of why problem is relevant to reader
- Solution
- Fear of missing out (FOMO)
- Call to action section
Remember: Most people on the native feed have just read content. The average article is somewhere between 500-800 words long. People are spending 2-3 minutes reading content before they reach the native feed. If you capture the attention of people after they’ve already invested 2-3 minutes reading an article about a topic, and pull them into your content, the likelihood that they will invest another 2-3 minutes is really high.
Don’t write articles that are extremely short or long unless split test with other articles with varied word length. If you generate that click, all you need to do is keep them engaged. Don’t push them into a VSL. Don’t push them to an offer page right away. Don’t brute force a conversion. Content is the best way to keep them warm, fully engaged, and reading. Build content pieces that capitalize on an engaged reader!
How to Make Profit and Drive Conversions on Native Ads?
The goal is to generate sufficient interest to get people to act TODAY. There are 2 elements to the sell.
- Value Proposition
- Design
Both must work together to achieve the best outcome. A really good value proposition with a poor design will result in a failed sell. A really good design with a terrible value proposition will result in low conversions. When looking at product pages, offer pages, and lead funnels, the more expensive the product, the harder it is to sell.
Key question: if someone can go and buy the product elsewhere right now, why would they buy it here?
If the user can Google in seconds the product and find an alternative product or solution that is cheaper, chances are conversions will be low. Perceived value is important here. It’s about creating an engaged and value-add package for the user. Selling a cheap product translates to a low perceived value and lower conversions. Create bundles of perceived value! In tier 1 countries, $40-$80 seems to be the sweet spot to incentivize users to purchase.
9 out of 10 times, keeping the offer pages simple is the way to go. Adding complexity to an offer page is going to increase the amount of time it takes the user to make a purchase decision.
- Remove distracting elements
- Remove disturbing pop-ups
- Remove click-out options
Make the purchasing decisions as linear and straightforward as possible. Keep offer pages simple and can make an upsell further down the funnel. On Facebook or Google, users have a certain intent such as shopping and they have time to research. On native, 99.9% of the people are not in the state of mind and don’t have a strong intent.
The goal is to make the user slide through the product page, input their credit card, and immediately check out!
Most of Taboola and Outbrain spend comes from US and Tier 1 countries. Running in tier 2 countries will generate an immense amount of untapped users. Example: Spain is 1/9th the average CPC price of Germany which is 20-40% below US. This presents a search arbitrage opportunity on native ads. If you have can operate offers outside of the US, such as search arbitrage campaigns, explore them.