By Hemali Dave

The end goal of any advertising or marketing exercise is to gain a purchase from the consumer. Even if it is not a desired outcome, all campaigns are aligned to one goal - the growth of a business. The idea is to attract the consumer to your product, establish its value and hope that the consumer will buy it.

Following this path, most of digital advertising's success is based on Return on Investment (RoI). If we spent X amount of money on an advertising campaign, did it generate enough sales to justify it? Although it can result in clicks that lead to a sale, native advertising does much more than just driving that click.

Meet your top-funnel KPIs
Native advertising does wonders for marketers when it comes to driving more conversions. Its effectiveness is best seen in the upper layers of the marketing funnel where the objectives range from creating brand awareness to building brand perception and influencing purchase decisions.

Although conventional digital advertising has been quite successful in driving clicks that result in sales, today it struggles to achieve KPIs that are tied to these objectives. This is because today, digital advertising finds itself battling ad fatigue and banner blindness. The feeling of being constantly sold to, coupled with a constant barrage of in-your-face digital ads, has made consumers resistant to engaging with digital advertising even if its immediate goal is to not drive a sale.

Native advertising breaks this clutter by integrating well with the consumer's content experience. With its ability to blend in a brand's content with the consumers experience in a contextual manner, it attracts them to engage.

Moreover, it enables brands to build a narrative that takes consumers on a journey, through a series of ads that tell a story. By blending in with content perceived by consumers as high quality, it also creates a positive association for the brand and enhances its image.

This also means that a native ad not only helps you drive conversions from your campaigns at the onset, but also improves the overall lifetime value of the customers acquired.

Native ads done right means campaign KPIs met
Although native ads can help you achieve your campaign KPI, this can happen only if these campaigns are well thought out.

There are three thumb rules to making a native ad campaign effective:
Besides these, it is very important to ensure that the campaign objective is in line with the landing page. The chances of your campaign KPI being met drop drastically if your native ad says one thing and leads to another. Furthermore, it is ideal to have campaigns customised for devices, as it helps build greater efficiency and scale.

Finally, it is good to have your native advertising campaign being run across multiple networks. This improves the chances of your campaign KPIs being met, as your campaign can now reach wider audiences, across premium publishers with sharper targeting.

The writer Business Head of content at Zirca Digital Solutions