A Guide to Native Advertising for Destination Marketers

By blending in with your website design, native ads provide an improved user experience and drive higher click-through-rates.

Visitors to your destination website are very qualified, meaning they are highly likely to travel to your destination or they are already in-market and looking for things to do and see. Digital advertising programs offer an effective and measurable way for your community partners to reach these visitors and planners.

At Tempest, we work with dozens of destinations to develop successful ad programs and monetization strategies. From ad implementation and ad-serving technology all the way to trafficking, pricing, reporting, and invoicing, we help destinations create streamlined and effective monetization programs.

Why Switch from Traditional to Native?

Recently, we've helped many of our industry partners to update their traditional display advertising to native advertising instead. In switching from basic display advertising to native advertising, our clients and their partners have realized so many amazing benefits and results. 

What is Native Advertising?

Native advertising is the use of paid advertising content that matches the look and feel of your website. Native ads will blend in with your regular content and all of the biggest publishers on the web have adopted native advertising formats. The two examples above show a traditional ad (A) and a native ad (B). Take a close look at these two ad formats.

A. Traditional Display Ad

B. Native Ad

The traditional ad (A) looks pretty familiar, right? It's the kind of thing you immediately scroll past or avoid looking at when online. The native ad (B), however, features an interesting image and plain, easy-to-read text. Can you picture the native ad implemented on a DMO website? It would look a lot like regular website content - and that is the entire point. By blending in with your website design, native ads provide an improved user experience and drive higher click-through-rates. Here's another screenshot of our partner Visit Colorado Springs' website. Can you spot the native ads hiding in this image?

Here are the top benefits our destination marketing partners have realized when implementing native advertising on their websites:

1. It is quicker and easier to get ads running.

Chasing down ad creative from your partners can be frustrating and time consuming. Many local partner businesses have limited time and resources, making it difficult for them to create advertising assets. With a native advertising program in place, there's no need to get a graphic designer involved. All you need is a simple image and text. This will save time and aggravation for you and your partners.

2. Simple formats allow for easy A/B testing.

The simplicity of native ad formats allows your organization to test changes to the ad creative with ease. Run an A/B test on the ad image, copy, or the call-to-action and see which tweaks and changes perform best for your partners. Partners will appreciate this attention to detail and added value and insight into which tactics work for their business. 

3. Native formats improve the user experience.

Just because it's an ad, doesn't mean it has to be unattractive or disruptive. We can help identify effective native placements that blend in with the look and feel of your website. The goal of native advertising is to enhance the overall user experience with targeted placements that are relevant to your visitors' needs. 

4. Click-through-rates are soaring.

When taking a client's advertising program from traditional display to native, we are consistently wowed by the results. According to Google, native ads typically generate four-times higher average click-through-rates (CTRs) than display ads. When switching from traditional to native ads, we've seen several clients experience year-over-year ad CTR percentage gains in the triple-digit range, with several programs showing more than a 500 percent increase in CTRs.

Think about how happy your partners will be with an advertising solution that's easier and generates increased visibility and traffic to their websites. Check out a few Native Advertising implementations on websites likeVisitcos.com, Visitlagunabeach.com, and VisitPittsburgh.com.