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Native Advertising Guide: How Affiliates Can Use It

What is native advertising? If you haven’t stumbled upon the term “Native Advertising” yet, you must be a complete novice in affiliate marketing or you’ve just returned from a vacation on the Moon. Indeed, Native Advertising (abbreviated as NA) has been discussed everywhere over the last few years, but, still, the practice of “going native” might seem confusing for a great deal of affiliates.

“So why do native ads seem so tricky?”

A native ad is an ad that doesn’t look like an ad.

This formula sounds like a tongue twister, but, somehow, it can turn your ad into a magnet for users. Simply because native ads are less annoying than hard-selling banners. They don’t pop out like a jack-in-the-box and they don’t scream like lunatics.

“And that’s all?”

The blending capacity is only a half of the equation.

Another hugely important reason why native ads irritate users less, is clever targeting. Networks that create and run native ads use technologies that personalize every ad impression. They recommend products or content relevant to the website’s context and the users’ browsing experience.

That’s why NV massively depends on smart targeting and traffic tracking. Native advertising and users’ data tracking are actually two sides of the same coin. A coin that has already earned the industry millions of dollars.

“Why are affiliates going crazy over native ads?”

Actually, NA is the reason why affiliates are optimistic about the future of Internet advertising. It is on the rise now because NA is the solution to “banner blindness” – a phenomenon that nearly spoiled the party for web advertisers . Since website visitors got immune to buy-now ads, the native format became a lifesaver for the entire industry.

Native advertising is a healthy step more and more affiliates are taking to adapt to the constantly changing Internet landscape. To keep on earning profits, you need to meet the tastes of your audience. Users come to websites for content, not for ads. They can smell when someone is forcing them to buy. They adapt. You need to adapt too.

“Alright, I want to earn with native ads. What should I do?”

The first step is to choose a reliable and efficient network.

Advice: choose a platform with with a long-term experience.

There are a few companies that actually started experimenting with native advertising back in 2000s. For example, one of the first global networks – MGID – introduced their system 10 years ago and honed it into a truly efficient promotional technology with an impressive targeting capacity. According to their clients’ reviews, this network is a great place to start your work with NA. Here’s why MGID earned so many loyalty points:

1. Newbie-friendly
Unlike the vast majority of other NA systems, MGID’s managers will contact you as soon as you sign up on the platform. You don’t even need to make a deposit. Your manager will clarify all pre-deposit details.

2. Personal assistance
Although MGID’s interface is user-friendly and the process of creating, targeting, and managing campaigns is pretty straightforward, you can contact your personal manager every time. The patient support of committed MGID managers truly proves that people are company’s greatest asset.

3. Free creatives
The services of MGID’s creative team is at your disposal free of charge. Although you can make ads on your own, we advise you not to neglect the skills and experience of their in-house teasers. They can come up with really brilliant ideas for attention grabbing and yet relevant ads.

4. Optimization
MGID has a very helpful feature called Selective Bidding – a powerful tool to optimize your publishers. It shows all the info: the maximum bid you’ve set, clicks, money spent, average CPC, and the number of conversions. Based on this information, you can decide which publishers to turn off and which placements, ads, GEOs, Operating Systems, Browsers to raise your bid on.

5. Statistics
When it comes to boosting your campaign’s conversions, statistics is the key. MGID gives their clients access the detailed statistics where you’ll find all the info about impressions, clicks, money spent, average CPC, and average CTR. You can select the stats by period, domain, region, country, OS, etc.

KJ Rocker’s Special Offer: Get a dedicated account manager for your account when you signup with MGID Native Ad Network. Click here to get started.

What makes Mgid different from other native sources?

MGID has a well-established international presence. In 2017, the platform reaches more than a billion unique visitors every single month in the European region (31.2%), Asia Pacific (27.2%), LATAM (19.7%), North America (15,8%), and Middle East (6.2%).

About 70% of its traffic is smartphone-generated which makes the platform a great choice for mobile advertising.

The system works on CPC pricing model (you are charged only if users click on your ads).

MGID demographics
MGID demographics

Also, we allow A / B testing of creatives and preldenders. We are well aware of the needs of performance marketers because we made the best in the market tracking options that include a symlink integration that allows you to set up tracking in 1 click with tracking systems such as “Kochava, Cake, Voluum, Hasoffers, Adsbridge etc.”

We have the most flexible system on the market that allows you to get more for less money. We can change the price not only for individual teasers (in most of competitors’ systems the price changes only for a campaign) but also for different regions and for each individual AD, also you can change the price at publishers IDs level and our completely new feature – you can change it by publishers sub-ids. Of course, bids could be adjusted manually at anytime.

MGID is one of the main Native traffic sources globally. Compared to competition, we provide the most targeting options in the industry, including OS, browser (+versions) and Language (browser locale).

MGID facilitates wide diversity of verticals ranging from Health and Beauty, Weight Loss, and Dating to Online Games, Lifestyle and Entertainment, Finance and politics.

MGID requires $100 as the minimum deposit to launch a campaign. However, we recommend that you have at least $500 in your account, which guarantees a dedicated Account Manager. MGID’s account managers do all the “dirty work” for clients, including campaign set-up, optimization, creative requests and ongoing optimization.

It’s very easy to get started.

All you need is sign up on MGID.com : Signup on MGID Network
To create a campaign on MGID, you need to go to the Advertiser section of your account and click the Add Campaign button. It’s the only green button you’ll see. The campaign creation process consists of 5 steps.

Step 1: General Info

If you have actual products or services, you need to choose the “Product promotion”. In case you want to draw attention to articles on your website (arbitrage), go for the “Content promotion”.

Then, you must decide which Category suits your campaign. There are 25 of them, so you are guaranteed to find the one that matches your offer. Additionally, there are sub-categories to get even more granular.

Keep in mind that each of two Campaign Types has different categories and requirements (check all creative requirements here: https://www.mgid.com/creative-guidelines)

Finally, you choose the Language of your campaign. Note that you can choose only 1 language per 1 campaign. If you want to promote a multi-GEO offer, you should create separate campaigns for each GEO-targeting. Your creatives should be designed using the specific language of that region as well.

Step 2. Targeting

In this section, you adjust your offer to targeting your desired audience.
MGID’s targeting options include:
– GEO (country + region)
– Browser (11 options available now)
– Browser language
– Devices and OS (Desktop, Mobile and/or Tablet and the respective OS version)

Although you can’t select a mobile carrier for your campaign, you can ask your manager to create a whitelist for IP ranges for a carrier you’d like to target.

Step 3. Limits

MGID provides ability to set caps not only by budget, but also by number of conversions or even clicks. Actually, by limiting your campaign by the number of clicks, you won’t exceed your expected budget.

Step 4. Tracking Tags

Use it in case you need to set up UTM tags. If you want to set a Postback in the next Step, add a click ID token from your Network in the custom tracking tag.

Step 5. Conversion Sensor

There are two ways to track conversions with MGID. If you have a content promotion campaign, you can place a code on your pages. Another option is using a Postback URL and setting goals for your campaign.

If you decide to use a tracking code, just click on the “Get Tracking Code” button to generate your sensor code. Then, copy-paste it in the source-code of every page you want to track conversions from.

Use Postback option if you’re not a direct owner of an offer and don’t have access to the offer page source code.

That’s all! Once your ads are approved, your campaigns goes live.

What Top Geos and Top verticals does MGID have?

Currently, the best-performing verticals are healthcare, bizopp, dating, gambling, desktop gaming, etc. The strongest GEO’s are United States, United Kingdom, Viet Nam, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Italy

MGID Native ad network traffic map
MGID Native ad network traffic map

If we talk about specific GEO and best match verticals for them, here is a short list for each:

1. US – Investments and bitcoin trading, Consumer products, Health&Beauty, Dating
2. Thailand – Weight loss, Binary, ED
3. Germany – Online games, Gambling
4. Italy – Dating
5. Romania – Weight loss, Health&Beauty offers.
6. Indonesia – Forex, Anti-age creams
7. Viet Nam – Weight loss, Money making, ED
8. India – Hair loss, Casino, Moneymaking.

How long to let a campaign run?

Usually, for test campaign we recommend 14 days with 10-15 ads for starters. This period lets us gather required data to properly optimize client’s campaigns. The budget itself highly depends on the number of GEOs and offers the client starts with. Though, $1,500-$2,000 is typically enough to test.

Bidding Strategy

The prices depend on the GEO’s and devices you are targeting. In order for you to acquire high quality inventory you should be highly competitive on the market. There is no sense in starting a campaign with small bids since you will end up buying only remnant traffic, and not allow yourself a chance to truly test quality placements. Setting optimal bids (or even a bit higher) at the beginning will allow you to get good volumes of traffic right away. Thus you will gain high CTR’s and you’ll be able to slightly decrease the bids/set coefficients on the go based on the overall performance of specific placements. It’s the most efficient way to squeeze the most from the sources your ROI’s sky rocket from and paying an optimal price to have a fair profitability on lower performing once. Selective bidding is super flexible tool which in good hands will help maximize ROI’s from every cent invested.

Trends for the 2018.

1.New verticals
If you notice a tendency don’t follow it, create your own trend. Pursue new verticals, try to work more with white hat offers, e-commerce, сrypto offers and any online education.

2. New Geos
Nowadays, booming Geos are Asia and Tier 1. But as practice shows the one who will be first to find a new GEO – receives the greatest profits in the new “El Dorado”

We recommend you to take a look at LATAM and Eastern / Central Europe. These GEOs promise to be THE NEXT BIG THING.

3. Focus on mobile
In 2017, Mobile accounted for 59.9% of all internet traffic. The share for desktop was just 40.1%. So it is expected the percentage of the mobile traffic to grow even more in 2018.

4. The rise of machine driven performance optimization.

Algorithms are still not able to replace people but can really help us.

Optimization solutions help thousands of performance marketers maximize their profits and optimize the spend of their budgets.

The machine learning becomes more effective in helping to earn more with less effort.

It’s very important to remember that you just need to use all your tools. There is not only a blacklisting and blocking of campaigns tools for optimization. In MGID there is also available to use selective bidding, per-sub-id blocking, flex bidding and other tools. If you do not use them and just block the placements – you will lose.

The more active publishers you have – the better CTR in MGID System and the more successful the WGW you can pay. Do not block a lot of publishers. Try to use selective bidding and periodically check your blacklists,cause we and our publishers are working on the placements improving their performance.

Conclusion

 

Personally I love the networks with good customer support as this is one major factor which can really help your  campaigns, MGID being one of the oldest and most well-known Native Ad networks around always comes in my list of favorites because of their fantastic support and also the fact that they have premium traffic inventory which always converts well. If you are looking for quality traffic in Native Advertising  I would highly recommend you to check out MGID.Get Started Today!

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