Advertising, especially banner adverts, has been around the human race for something that stretches thousands of years. The idea to take a bit of space up and promote something is not a new idea at all, but it is something with a proven track record that gains results. Google AdWords/AdSense is proof of that, where the vast majority of websites on the internet monetize the traffic entering them through displaying image adverts.

However, there has been a recent newcomer to advertising: native advertising. Native advertising works by showing adverts in a way that blends naturally into a design of a website. This means the structure of the advert will vary from one website to another, since it is directly dependent on the theme design and functionality of each respective website. This sounds all too good to be true, to have adverts embedded seamlessly into the structure of a website. However, there are some drawbacks or ‘cons’ to native advertising – here are some of them.

Misleading Traffic

The whole concept behind native adverts working is the fact that they mislead traffic into thinking they are natural content, whereas it is a paid advert/sponsorship. You’re luring traffic into a false sense of trust if you are trying to make adverts appear as content.

It is a question of morale for this negativity. Some of your traffic won’t care about you misleading them, while others will be very upset over the fact they can’t trust all of the content on your website now. Is it right to mislead traffic in this way? Or is it okay if the content being advertised natively is useful to the web user etc.?

Negative SEO Impact

Since you are embedding native adverts into your website design, aimed at looking just like content, you should not be surprised at all to learn that native advertising will have a negative impact to your website’s search engine ranking. Therefore, it should be noted that native advertising should be implemented in moderation. The ratio between content to native adverts should be kept very high to limit the SEO impact, as well as to make sure the native adverts blend well into the content already on the website.

What Should be Advertised Natively?

Since the approach to native advertising is different to traditional advertising, the content inside a native advert should be too, and depends significantly on what your website’s content is about. For example, websites such as Twitter will be wanting native adverts that inform and share something useful and intriguing with the web user, since this is generally what normal tweets will do to the web user.

If you use native advertising to create adverts similar to those used in PPC, the results will be poor: for websites that run native advertising, the user experience will be very low.