Native Ads 101 (Taboola/Outbrain):

If you’re looking to grow your eCommerce store, diversify your paid traffic sources and reach an entirely new (and mostly untapped) segment of the internet, this webinar (and article) is for you.

Why? Because you’ll discover all the latest native ads strategies that your competitors aren’t using yet – so you can use native in the most efficient way to start acquiring new customers profitably at scale.

We have recently organised a webinar about Native Ads on our Facebook group. Our guest, Emmanuel Fredenrich, was an eCommerce entrepreneur who has generated over $25 million in sales over the last 4 years for his own and his clients’ eCom businesses.

Emmanuel has been secretly crushing it on the internet by using some very unusual traffic channels. Everyone, especially in the eCommerce community, is focused on Facebook and Google, but it turns out that there’s such a wide scope of different advertising channels where the competition is less strong, and the potential to scale is much, much bigger. And I feel that for every eCommerce entrepreneur, it’s good to get educated on what’s available out there.

That’s why Emmanuel told us about :

• Why native ads (Taboola and Outbrain specifically) are the most untapped high-quality traffic source on the internet.
• Why it’s so easy to scale campaigns on native and reach 5 or 6 figures per day in profitable ad spend.

Ready? Let’s learn from Emmanuel Fredenrich!

One thing I always say is that if everyone is doing something, you should run away from that thing. And obviously, it’s like a half-truth, because Facebook is a great platform. But I always like to think outside the box. Probably that’s why I’ve done so well with natives over the years. I also just came in at the right time. But in any case, I now have useful insights for people who want to learn about this traffic source.

Whatever you want to achieve with an eCommerce store, it’s definitely possible to achieve it with native. The thing about native is you can just scale at an incredible rate once you have something working, and I think that’s really the biggest benefit of it.

What’s the difference between native and Facebook? Facebook is about constantly finding winners. It works at lower scales for more specific markets, and obviously, the algorithms are always going to be better, because it’s a multibillion-dollar company. With native, on the other, it’s hard to make something work. But when you actually find a way to do it, you can just scale it super fast.

My first experience of that craziness of the scale was when I run a supplement business. That was also my start in the negative. I had a working campaign that was making about 1k per day, which is already a lot of money (it was spending around 800). And then, one day, I managed to secure the funds to spend more. And I just uncapped and raised the budget to the maximum you could raise. The next day, that same campaign was spending around $6,000, and it made over 10k. I thought that was really powerful.

What I like about natives is the stability it gives me. Obviously, you have to adjust it and keep optimizing. But over time, performance does tend to stay constant. There are definitely some downsides – probably the biggest one is there’s a lot of verticals that are not adapted for native ads. Then the second big downside is that especially now, it’s really difficult to get something actually to work. I can talk about all the crazy results I’ve had. But at the end of the day, I’ve also had tons of failures, because most of what you do is not going to work.

On the other hand, the scale is incredible. And once you have something that works, you don’t really have to worry about scaling. To me, the word scaling is literally built into native. Native is scaling.

Indeed, at this point, you might be wondering what the hell is this magical scale thing, right? So I’m going to show you what it is because there’s nothing that explains things better than seeing them in the real world.

Here is the MSN website, which is actually widely used, contrary to what you probably think. And at the bottom, you can see some ads, which are called native ads.

We call it native because it’s built into the website. Now, if we’re being super technical, Facebook ads are also native because they are integrated into the feed. But in the internet marketing lingo, native ads are specifically ads like this, ads that are built into the websites.

What makes native so great is that they are right next to the articles. They blend in perfectly. People know it’s an ad because it says so. However, the news website itself lends credibility to those ads, because there’s always this thought in the back of people’s minds, that if it’s here, it can’t be complete bullshit.

So now, we know what it is, we know what it does. Now let’s let’s talk about how actually to make it work.

There are two big players in the native worlds and a couple of other minor ones. The biggest player number one is called Taboola. It’s probably one of the highest quality traffic sources on the internet. They have tons of premium websites. They’re super strict about what you can and can’t run, which means the traffic quality is extremely high because you have big brands on there as well. My experience with Taboola says that if you can have ads there, it’s very difficult not to make money.

The other network is called Outbrain. A couple of years ago, outbrain used to be what Taboolais now, meaning they were the high-quality guys, very restrictive. And then about two years ago things kind of flipped. And now they allow more things to run, but their traffic is a little bit lower. So it means you can be a little bit more aggressive there. However, it takes more effort to get a campaign to work, you have to have a great copy in a great funnel. But the upside is there are some things you can run on Outbrain that you couldn’t hold on Taboola, such as anything related to anti-aging.

So how does it work? What kind of things actually work on native?

Native is a mainstream platform. If your product does not solve a problem that affects more than at least 15% of the population, it’s probably not good for natives. That’s because we really do any targeting with native now. I know it sounds bad, but the native algorithm is also very smart. It can figure out what the user is more likely to want to buy or not. So technically, there’s an algorithm that kind of does the targeting for you. And also, your headline kind of does the targeting for you.

But the downside is if you have a product that is more specific and doesn’t solve a problem that is relatively big or doesn’t offer a solution that a lot of people would want, use native ads.

Examples of niches and products that historically have done well on native:

• Anything health-related that affects a lot of people.
  • Weight loss,
  • Anything related to having more energy,
  • Products related to pain, e.g., back pain and joint pain,
  • Hair loss products,
• Dog and cat health,
• Internet speed,
• Snoring,
• Language learning.

I think these examples give you already a pretty good idea of what tends to work and not work.

Once the ad is on, people see it, they’re interested, they click it, and what happens next? They get to what’s called an advertorial.

Now it’s time for the big takeaway from this webinar – what works on native is different then what works almost everywhere else.

You need to remember that people who land on the advertorial are coming from the news websites. That’s when the funnel congruence plays an important role. It’s a very old principle used by almost any good marketer. It says that wherever you’re taking people from, whatever kind of ad you’re using, whatever kind of image you’re using, your ad should be congruent with where people go after the click. It’s called the post-click experience. And in order to maximize that post-click experience on native, you have to keep them within that same news environment.

So what these guys did here (image above) is very smart. This is a page for a WiFi booster, that exact same page has been running for years, they only change the date (which you’re not really supposed to do).

Anyway, this advertorial is a news article designed to sell a product. It consists of:

• Information about it being an ad – as an advertiser, you’re legally obligated to show advertorial at the top of an article.
• A clickbait title – that’s what makes it successful, the clickbait language draws the attention. That first headline of your advert is the key to the success of your whole funnel. Ideally, if possible, you should match the headline of your ad with the headline of your advertorial.
• Content which is basically an article about a product. It has a format of an article, and it tells the story. There are reviews of the product, explanations of how it works, etc.,
• Call to action which redirects users to the actual product page,
• Obligatory disclosures in the footer.

In this example, the authors placed their logo at the top of the website, but you don’t have to do that. I recommend creating your own landing page that looks like a news website, you can even create a logo. It’s an effective approach because if you recommend your product there, people see it as an unrelated website writing about its features. It can significantly increase the conversion rate.

There are two aspects that make people doubt in this approach:

• Legal aspect – they ask if this is legal. But it absolutely is – you are allowed to create a website for your product, create a news domain, advertise your products, etc. As long as you inform people that it’s an ad (and you have to), it’s all perfectly fine.
• Brand aspect – they are afraid of how this will affect the brand image. I would say it’s great for your branding, as it looks like an endorsing website that builds trust among readers.

It’s a third-party perspective. The biggest challenge of internet marketing in 2020 is not making crazy claims. Anyone can make crazy claims, but very few people can actually prove

that their claims are true. And this is why native works so well because it looks like it’s a news article that is indoorsy.

If you additionally create your news domain, from the consumer perspective, it’s even more credible. If there’s a third party entity that endorses your brand, it looks better than yourself endorsing yourself. Apple doesn’t say they are great, because there’s already so many people saying they’re great. And you can create that same effect by following this strategy.

I would say that about 95% of what works on native is something along those lines. There’s no point in trying to be creative in this area, trying to reinvent the wheel. This is what works.

Native ads are also useful for Facebook campaigns. On native, you can get tons of sales relatively quickly if you have the right product-market fit. And then, you can use that native data to feed your Facebook pixel and vice versa. I’s very well connected together.

In general native ads are CPC based. There are some other networks where you can do programmatic buying, or you can do CPM, but CPC is way better and more common.

In Taboola, they have developed over the years a feature called Smart Bids, which optimizes your auctions. With Smart Bids, you only pay as much as needed to beat the next bid, even if your budget is higher. So it saves you some money.

Another thing available in both Taboola and Outbrain is when you launch an ad with the image or headline that has already run before, the algorithm is going to take that into account when it decides what to show or not to show, which is why, for example, if you submit ten ads, typically one of them right off the bat is going to get the old attraction. And the reason why is because the algorithm knows this ad or an ad that is similar to this one has already run for a product like this, and it did well.

Check out the full webinar to learn more about the CPA and how to decide on the native ads budget. There are also some other questions from the audience – about retargeting with native ads, an ideal structure of an advertorial, or the funniest product that Emmanuel has advertised on native ads! 

I hope you’ve learned a lot about native ads, and you now know how to include them in your marketing strategy! If you don’t want to miss our other webinars, which are always full of practical knowledge, remember about joining our Facebook group! See you there!