Jonathan David, CEO and Founder of Tapstone, has overseen the development and delivery of more than 1,000 successful native ad campaigns to date. Here are his five simple steps to native campaign success, that you can get started on right now:
- Get Your Targeting On Point
Goldilocks knew her stuff. She didn’t settle on anything ‘til it was juuuuust right. And that’s the key to targeting at the front end of all your campaigns. If you set the target audience parameters too narrowly, you’ll negatively affect your campaign’s ability to scale. Don’t make them specific enough? You’ll be burning through your budget at high speed with few conversions.
One research study shows that Click-Through Rate (CTR) of an ad can be averagely improved as high as 670% by properly segmenting users. (Yan et al. 2009. The 18th Int. World Wide Web Conferences, WWW 2009).
So, how do you find that sweet spot if you’re not ready or able to hire an expert to tell you where your ad budget will get the most traction?
One simple approach is to do a little research on a competitor’s placements and then ‘piggy back’ on some of their targeting choices when you make your buys. To do this you can use online tools such as Alexa http://www.alexa.com  or Similar Web https://www.similarweb.com , alone or in combination with traditional syndicated research.
- Generate Creativity
 Remember: when it comes to creative it doesn’t matter if you like it, it matters if it works. Develop at the very least three different creatives for your campaign, then test them with a small buy. Use those results to select the lead creative and put the rest of your budget in to placements for that top performing work. When testing creative it’s important to know if you have statistically significant results. If you don’t have a data scientist at your disposal, you can use a simple online tool such as http://www.splittestcalculator.com/. The difference between top performing creative and a lack luster creative can be an up to 10 x higher CTR – so it’s more than worth getting right.
Want to know what makes a creative a top performer? That’s where Tapstone’s ‘secret sauce’ comes in (contact us for a free consult if you want to know more) but in short, it’s finding the perfect combination of: a product that solves a problem or satisfies a need, along with the very best wording in your headline, sub-head, and body copy, accompanied by a superior image.
- Befriend Analytics
Advertising is a 24/7 business, ads are being served, pages are being visited and conversions are being made, all the time. At any given moment, activity happening (or not happening) with your campaign could be giving you clues as to how to get better results. The question is, are you able to access those clues as they are being created, or do you get a report of that data, those clues, after it’s all over and your budget is long gone?
Fight for access to real-time data analysis and then use it to optimize your campaign daily.
- Protect Your Prospects
It’s pretty common within the Native advertising industry, to serve an ad to a prospect, and then when they click on it for more information, send them to another site to read more.
The challenge with this well-worn approach is that the ‘other site’ your prospect gets sent to, is also home to many other campaigns, so ‘distractability’ is high. And that could mean your prospect wonders off in to the maze of the internet before completing your desired action.
Based on Tapstone’s analysis of ‘unprotected’ campaigns, we predict between 50-90 per cent of prospects get ‘lost’ during the transition from initial creative to the full advertorial.
So wherever possible, you want to protect your prospect from the distractions of the internet, long enough for them to finish your funnel process. Doing this is certainly not simple but knowing its importance, is!
At Tapstone, we own and operate our own network of portals so prospects do not get sent to ‘other’ sites, they get sent to a site completely managed by us, to drive your desired action. If you’re serious about protecting your prospects we strongly recommend this approach (and of course, if building your own portal isn’t an option, you can work with us).
- Streamline Your Landing Page
Your landing page is where your campaign pays off. You’ve researched the perfect placements to reach your ideal audience, you’ve developed a beautiful creative that’s inspired the ideal audience to take action, and here they are, on your landing page, just one step away from some kind of conversion. This is the moment to make things as simple as possible for your potential client. Don’t clutter the page, make it clear and make it solely about the call to action.
To learn more about Native advertising, or for a free Tapstone analysis of your current native campaign, please contact us.
