Chris Quigley: 5 steps to building your native ad revenues

The majority of publishers have started to grow their native ad revenues. Typically a publisher who’s early on in their native monetisation will be selling ‘sponsored articles’ to brands via their in-house sales team, and will have integrated a ‘content recommendation widget’ at the bottom of their webpages to create new revenues through 3rd party ads.

These are good first steps. The following gives a 5 step guide to growing your native revenues to a significant scale, dividing activity into ‘direct sell native’ (i.e. your in-house sales team selling native ad products) and ‘programmatic native’ (i.e. 3rd party monetisation):

Stage 1: The basics

Direct: Sponsored content sales

Programmatic: Recommendation widget integration

Most publishers start their native revenues by selling advertorials/sponsored content; this content is normally distributed initially via an in-house solution mixing distribution via their Content Management System (CMS) and/or display ad slots.
From a programmatic perspective, a good start for a publisher is to integrate a recommendation widget like Ligatus or Plista; this is quick and easy to do, and results in immediate new revenues.

Stage 2: Scaling sponsored content

Direct: Creation of ‘native ad units’, addition of standardised content analytics and the simplification of Ad Operations workflows

Programmatic: –

The second step for publishers is generally to look at how to scale their sponsored content programmes. This usually starts with looking to improve native distribution by adding ‘native ad units’ across their website (you can see example native ad units here). Additional improvements include creating ‘standardised content-marketing analytics’ and simplifying Ad Operations workflows. All of these three points can be addressed by implementing a native ad platform like Sharethrough.

Stage 3: Brand content distribution

Direct: 3rd party brand content distribution

Programmatic: –

Once a publisher has mastered selling their own sponsored content, and implemented a native ad platform, they can then look at getting their sales team to sell ‘3rd party brand content distribution’, i.e. taking content created by a brand like Intel (e.g. an article or a video from the Intel IQ content hub) and distributing it via your native ad units.

Brands are creating increasing amounts of content, and giving your sales team the ability to distribute this content (via native ad units) gives you access to new revenue streams.

Stage 4: Programmatic native v.1

Direct: –

Programmatic: Using a Native Ad Network, and adding ‘mediation’

Having implemented ‘native ad units’ across your websites and started to scale your sponsored content direct sales, you will probably find that you only manage to sell maybe 1/3 of all your native ad impressions. To help generate further native revenues, you can plug into a Native Ad Network like the Sharethrough Exchange to generate revenues from 3rd party demand.

If you want to go one step further, you could add additional native ad networks and ‘mediate’ between them to optimise yield.

Stage 5: Programmatic native v.2

Direct: Private Marketplace (PMP)

Programmatic: Programmatic RTB2.3 demand

The final step is to further develop your programmatic native offering by setting up Private Marketplaces (PMPs) and adding programmatic RTB demand.

If you’re a premium publisher, then setting up native Private Marketplace deals with agency trading desks means you can access programmatic advertising budgets from your clients at a premium price.

If you have a large amount of native ad impressions still unmonetised, then you can plug into 3rd party demand from programmatic RTB2.3 demand.

N.B. if you’re new to the world of programmatic and especially programmatic native, here’s some further reading to help:
– Private Marketplace definition: Here’s a very good explanation from Exchange Wire.
– Open RTB2.3 and programmatic native: Here’s a good introductory guide to programmatic native from Sharethrough.

Your ‘Complete Native Revenue Model’

By executing these 5 steps you will have built a sophisticated native revenue model, which will provide you with a solid basis to continue to grow your native revenues (as below)

The post Chris Quigley: 5 steps to building your native ad revenues appeared first on Native Advertising Institute.