How I launched my first native ads and earned 400 new customers

Photo credit: Pixabay.

I’ve been in the digital advertising field for a long time now and I have tried native advertising on my financial service business to see how it works. Back then, it was still a young digital advertising practice in reaching target audiences and increasing web traffic.

To gain enough confidence and proper guidance on trying native ads with my own money, I approached Vladimir Bashkin, an adtech expert and the business development director at Adnow, a native ad network. He helped me understand how using native ads could turn in better ROI. He said:

“Native ads allow advertisers to show ads only to engaged users and webmasters—to monetize content with a high income. Buying and selling advertising inventory is made via automated systems based on real-time bidding technology, which is the largest segment of programmatic—innovative system conquering the advertising market.”

My first campaigns

I ran a few native ads through Adnow for my business and observed how they gradually performed better. From generating around three leads at an optimized 0.3 percent conversion rate to 427 leads at 22 percent, my campaign really progressed.

If you observe, that’s around a 7,500 percent hike in the conversion rate with a 93 percent decline in the cost per head. The reason I chose Adnow is that it is considered as one of the most sensible platform for sharing content.

Creating content that draws people is important in native advertising. Therefore, the strategy lies in forming content that makes readers curious enough to go to your landing page. If users like what they see, they could subscribe to the service as well.

So, this was how my first native ad read like:

“Minimise the risks and maximize the perks by maintaining a stabilized financial status and take your life in your control in order to live it, just the way you want.”

It took a while to reach 1,046 clicks and a CTR of 0.80 for social media. The CPC reached 0.03 and every click was directed to the landing page. The landing page contained an interesting article that talked about financial crisis, reasons for financial imbalance, and how subscribing to a financial service provider will keep everything intact in your life. This ad got me 47 subscribers at 0.3 percent conversion rate, and I only paid a minimal cost plus the flat fee.

Though how I got the traffic seems lame, the output was tremendous and prompted me to post my second ad. In this campaign, I gave away a few tricks and tips on personal financial management as the benefit. This time, I got around 1,940 clicks with a CTR of 0.26 and with a 0.12 CPC.

The landing page offered some fundamental and self-sustainable tips and tricks, and this got me more subscriptions than I did the last time at a 4 percent conversion rate.

Some thoughts