Native Ads vs Display Ads: Differences Explained

Both display and native ads have a huge advertising demand because they’re great way to promote products and increase brand awareness. But which one is better for your website?

In this article, you’ll learn the main differences between display and native ads, and which of them you should use.

What are Display Ads?

Display ads also known as banner ads. They’re the most popular type of display advertising. This type of ads appeal to the audience through visual content.

Display ads vary in shapes and sizes. They can be displayed at the top of the page (billboard banner), on the side (sidebar banner), between paragraphs of text, and more.

Due to the evolution of advertising technology, today you can find display ads with interactive elements, like video, audio, and clickable elements, known as rich media ads.

Example of Display Ads

Display ad is fully clickable

Source: Ad Tech Daily

Banner ad with clickable element

Source: Entrepreneur

What are Native Ads?

Native ads ‘blend’ into the publisher’s content. Native ads work by matching the website’s design, look and feel. Therefore, they provide a better user experience compared to other ad formats because users don’t get interrupted by flashy ads while consuming the content.

Affied provides publishers with native ads alongside other advanced ad formats.

Monetize Your Website with Affied

IAB currently divides native ads into 3 formats:

In-Feed/ In-Content Units
Content Recommendation Ads
Branded/ Native Content

Usually, you can identify native ads on the website as those with a “promoted” or “sponsored” message next to them.

Moreover, native ads don’t just come in different sizes but also formats, such as video ads and recommendation blocks.

Native Ad Examples

Native ad examples are most common across in-feed units, recommendation widgets, and promoted listings.

In-feed units appear directly in the article, blog post, or the social network newsfeed.

Source: Entrepreneur

Content recommendation ads appear as a recommended content on the publisher’s website (supplied by content discovery platforms like Outbrain and Taboola).

Source: Business Insider

Branded/ native content appears as a paid editorial content from a brand and is usually created in collaboration with the publisher’s content teams.

Source: Macworld

Promoted listings usually appear on e-commerce websites as products or services offered by a given website and labeled as “sponsored” or similar. (Note, this format is now a part of the In-Feed native)

Source: Gumtree

Main Difference Between Native Ads and Display Ads

Unlike display ads, native ads intentionally don’t look like ads; instead, they look like part of the editorial flow of the webpage.

Native Ads	Display Ads
Blend in with the surrounding content	Stand out from the rest of the content
Ads are consumed as content	Can be overlooked because of ad blindness
Best for driving traffic to the advertiser’s website	Best for remarketing campaigns
CTR 0.8% (8.8x higher than display ads)	CTR 0.09%
Higher viewability (about 53% than standard display ads)	Lower ad viewability

Source: Kiplinger

What are Affied Native Ads?

Affied offers Native ad format that serves many native ads within an ad slot. Affied adjusts native ads’ style to match the website’s design as closely as possible.

Monetize Your Website with Affied

Affied Native Ad

Source: NousDecor

Our clients also benefit from an additional layer of demand not just from Google, but also 28 demand partners (SSPs) like Xandr, Pubmatic, OpenX, and others.

In addition, we run both native and display ads in the same ad placement to increase the overall ad revenue for particular ad placement.

Source: Creatufrase

Native Ads or Display Ads, or Both?

According to Statista, US native ad spend has reached $52.75 bln in 2020. Native advertising segment has been showing progressive growth in the past years and the trend is here to stay.

Source: Statista

Native ads are designed to be non-disruptive, and thanks to their native feel, they provide a better user experience, ad engagement, CTR, and ad viewability.

However, native ads don’t always generate higher CPMs for publishers than standard banner ads.

Therefore, Affied encourages publishers to use all available opportunities to maximize their yield. From our experience, a combination of both display and native ads is the right solution. Try Affied ad formats for your site by signing up!