Sports publishers show strong CTR with native ads

Sports publishers and consumer goods marketers seem to be the best poised to take advantage of premium native ads, according to a study of more than 6,000 branded content campaigns by Polar.

Polar provides a platform to serve native advertising into publishers’ content streams. Its The State of Premium Native: Benchmarks and Insights report examined more than 45,000 individual pieces of native creative and 18 billion premium native promotions for branded content that it served through its systems. Eight publishing verticals and eight product categories were examined.

Finding an average click-through rate of 0.31% for all “premium” native ads (which Polar defines as “the premium placement of promotional units on a publisher’s website that match the look and feel of surrounding content with clear labels”), the report states sports publishers enjoy a higher-than-average CTR of 0.38% overall – the strongest performance among the publisher groups.

Culture-focused publications performed second-best with an average CTR of 0.28%.

“Finance focused publications had a CTR almost 50% lower than average,” the report said, scoring only 0.15%. “Readers of finance focused content also spend less time on sponsored content.”

When it came to measuring which advertising verticals performed the strongest, discretionary consumer goods (cars, electronics, leisure and retail purchases) scored highest with a click-through rate of 0.23%, which was 28% higher than the next-best-performing category – health care, at 0.18%.

When assessing audiences willing to click into native ads as they broke down by geographical region, Canada found itself in the middle of the pack. Of the five regions the study examined, Canada’s average CTR was 0.28%.