What is Native Advertising – Let’s Dig it.

Native Advertising is a type of online advertising that matches to your online content and then deliver the ad based on the same form as though its written by the site publisher. To put it in simple words, native ads doesn’t look like an ad, it looks more like an article written by you. IAB approved around 6 native advertising forms which ad networks can use. Some of the formats of Native ads are Sponsored Video, Images, Articles, Music and Other Media. Here they are.

1. In Feed ads: These ad units are like a sponsored ad units which are placed over/between/under your content. For example, you can see how TechMeme.com displays the feeds and in between them they also display those sponsored content. Those are called In Feed Ad Units.

2. Search Ads: These are the ads which gets displayed in the search results whenever a user tries to search something in your site. The best example is Google. Google displays these ads marked in Yellow color and highlighted whenever the user tries to search something in Google search engine.

3. Recommendation Widgets: These ads are recommendation kind of sites, the one you can see in CNN or BBC sites and many other sites. What happens is that these ads get displayed under your content as a recommendation to your user asking them their interest if they would also like to see the content. These are usually written like “You may be also interested in”, or “From around the web”.

4. Promoted Listings: These are not content based ads, but are actually promoted ads. To clear the confusion, these are usually on eCommerce sites allowing to promote their listings of products. For example, Amazon.

5. In-Ad: These are normal contextual ads that are displayed based on keywords. These ads are the formal IAB standard ads and are measured on brand metrics.

6. Custom ads: Anything above that doesn’t match comes under this category.

Native Advertising however particularly deals with three major categories and they are In-Feed, In-Ad and Recommedation Widgets.