Why you should be running native if you’re optimizing for click-through rate
What is click-through rate? And is it important?
Click-through rate, CTR, is a metric for understanding advertising performance by calculating the percentage of people who have clicked your ad after they were served an impression. The equation for CTR is → clicks divided by impressions multiplied by 100. This number is an important value for understanding the effectiveness of a pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaign. In a PPC campaign, as evident by its name, you are mainly measuring success by the number of clicks you’ve earned. In cases like these, CTR is an extremely helpful metric.
While CTR is hugely helpful in PPC advertising, it is not the preferred metric for all campaigns. Instead, if possible, having tracking tags on your website allows you to optimize toward conversions and other more sophisticated metrics.
However, if you're limited for any reason, and optimizing for CTR is your strategy, there are certain ad formats that are far better suited for generating clicks than others. At the end of the day, clicks show that audiences are interacting with your ad which means you’re one step closer to a conversion.
So you are optimizing for CTR, what ad formats should you be using?
Native all the way!
Why?
1. High CTR
Our talented data scientists here at RTBiQ pulled a platform-wide CTR report to highlight top-performing ad units. Native was by far a standout with a click-through rate of 4.288%. The two next best performing ad creatives in terms of click-through rate were 768x1024 and 1024x768 with CTRs of 4.166% and 3.197%, respectively.
Thanks to our advanced proprietary technology and high-quality native ad partners including Mopub, AdX & Smaato, we boast native CTRs higher than industry benchmarks.
Also, native is 6:1 web:app. This means native is a perfect way to diversify your ad buy across environments. In-app placements are effective, but banners on the mobile web simply do not reach CTRs this high.
2. Less “fat finger clicks”
We all have had that experience of accidentally clicking a banner ad on our phone and thinking, "Oops, I didn't mean to click on that." Mobile banner ads are notorious for generating what are known as “fat finger clicks.” In fact, in a study conducted by a mobile-first shopping platform Retale, 60% of respondents reported “when they click banner ads on the mobile web or in an app, ‘it’s usually by accident.’”
However, with native advertisements you can feel a lot more confident that these clicks were intentional. There are a lot less of these “fat finger clicks” when it comes to native because you know your ad is always served in that environment where someone is doing something active. It's not popping up in their way, it's part of what they're looking at.
If you’re looking to have a strong click-through rate with meaningful interactions, native is the way to go!
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Interested in learning more? Talk with our expert team today!