By now, you’ve probably heard a thing or two about native advertising. Perhaps some of you have even dabbled with it. For those who might be new, native advertising seeks to seamlessly place your ad within the context of a web site’s content. It seeks to keep users within their experience as they present your ad.
Native is different from search because the user isn’t searching for your product or service at the time they encounter your content, however, when strategically implemented, it can still be successful and a valuable tool in your marketing kit.
While testing the waters with native, I learned how important it is to create ad copy that is different than search. As I like to say, I had to make sure that I was “telling instead of selling” because the user intent with native is completely different from that of search. Native is the opportunity to tell your audience a story about your product or service. It’s a chance to engage them on a level not possible with traditional search. When applied correctly, the results can be exceptional.
Yahoo has recently rolled out video as part of their native platform. Upon learning this fact, my interest was piqued, as I’ve been spending time recently learning how to best leverage video content. Since then, I’ve done some deeper research on this, which I will share with you below. Though I haven’t tested it out yet, I’ll be adding video to my list of initiatives to test this quarter.
Yahoo’s Native video runs everywhere on Yahoo, including web, mobile and app experiences, their digital magazines, and Tumblr. With that comes extensive reach for your video content. However, you’ll want to make sure that you’re spending advertising dollars on the right viewers. To that end, Yahoo has custom targeting options for your native ads that can help show your ads to the right audience. These options include:
- Search retargeting
- Behavioral targeting
- Site retargeting
- Mail domain retargeting
Utilizing these targeting options seems to be imperative, otherwise, you’re likely to waste advertising dollars on an audience who isn’t interested in your offerings.
Ready to give this a shot? Let’s talk about what you’ll need to get started. When in Yahoo’s Gemini platform, you can go to the “Know my brand” or “Download my app” campaigns and upload a video.
Videos need to be in the MP4 format and under 1G to run on the Yahoo Native platform. You’ll also have the option to include an image in the campaign, which can run at the beginning or at the end of the video.
As with anything we do in PPC, testing is instrumental. Upload different videos and images and monitor and gauge their performance. Just because one video doesn’t perform well doesn’t mean that another won’t. The goal is to put a lot out there and see what resonates best with your audience.
If you’ve ever done video advertising before, you already know that those first few seconds are the most important. If we don’t capture attention by that point, we are likely to lose that viewer. Also, make sure that you pay close attention to the landing pages that you’re directing users to. Are they closely associated with the video the user just watched? Are they mobile-friendly? These are all factors that will help turn these viewers into customers.
Final Thoughts
In this highly-competitive world of online advertising, it’s always good to test out any new feature that can make our ads more compelling and interesting. Native video could very well be a good way to take an advertiser’s video content and engage a potential customer. It’ll take a lot of testing, but if successful it can open up a whole new audience for the advertiser.
With so many of my clients continually asking me for new ways to utilize their video content, I’m definitely going to give Yahoo Native video a whirl and see what results it produces. We know not to expect the same results as traditional search, but if it extends our reach to the right audience a bit higher in the funnel, there’s value there as well.
