In our crazy ad-saturated world, the day has come where consumers have become more digitally-aware (yes, they may be evolving).

In our crazy ad-saturated world, the day has finally come where consumers have become more digitally-aware (yes, they may be evolving). That said, they can spot ads from a mile away and unless it’s a Super Bowl commercial – they avoid them like that gym membership they got back in ‘09 .

Now for the question on everyone’s mind: how can we get consumers to see our ads as added value to their lives?

While more traditional digital channels like standard display have their pros and cons, native advertising has quickly become a powerful digital marketing strategy for advanced marketers looking to improve ad recall.

By definition “native advertising” refers to any paid or sponsored media that adapts to the shape and form of a web property, and in doing so becomes inherently non-disruptive to a users experience.

That said, native advertising, unlike other formats, works to benefit campaigns  by capturing audiences mid-funnel and assisting in driving a large portion of site visits.

With the importance of native ads in mind, allow us to share 4 hand-picked hacks designed to help you custom-fit your native build to your consumers needs:

1. Ensure Relevance  
As we mentioned before, native’s secret weapon is its ability to apply a very natural and educational sideline ad that limits interference with a user’s experience. Due to its shape-shifting and effortlessly fluid nature, native is best used as a mid-funnel tactic to reach consumers amongst their browsing plateaus by utilizing a combination of contextual and behavioral targeting to ensure the utmost relevancy.

By striking consumers off-guard, native’s natural look allows it to effortlessey strike highly tuned-in consumers—resulting in high numbers of interested audiences driven to advertiser sites.

That said, we suggest looking for partners that have the ability to provide this type of duality in targeting tactics.

2. Rotate Multiple Ad Networks
As time progresses, viewer fatigue is inevitable—leading to fewer clicks for advertisers. For this reason, swapping your creative every 2-3 months is vital to keeping your consumers intrigued and more importantly engaged.

According to the Native Advertising Institute, keeping a variety of well performing ad-networks in reserve is the best way to increase your scale and maximize viewability within your desired demographic. By keeping a variety of networks at your disposal, you’ll then be able to expand your reach and expose your ads to your audience more frequently —working to reinforce messaging and brand recall.

3. Creative Best Practices
Deciding how to design and layout native ads is of vital importance. That said, color and imagery should always work as a team to represent the mood and tone of your brand. In our own experience, we’ve found that more vibrant colors, paired with adaptable images ready to re-size to fit any display, work best in terms of driving site visits.

4. Test Like Your Business Depends On It (because it does)
We recommend setting a minimum of 4-8 ad variations to test. No matter how big or small your variations are, utilizing A/B testing methods will help you pinpoint what is and isn’t working and assist in deciding which image and message combo resonates with your audience.

native advertising has timelessly prevailed over the years with higher recorded CTR and higher ad recall due to its natural, seamless and non-disruptive nature.

Conclusively, it’s essential that native be placed in the marketing mix for certain awareness based campaigns in order to fluidly, and successfully, populate your messages across the web.