Nudge looks into Native content regularly to find out which content and publishers perform the best in each industry. It’s a chance to see what others are doing and take learnings for the next campaign.

Key Metrics

The most important KPIs to look at are Attention, Engagement and Earned Impressions Ratio.

Attention is the time that a person is actively consuming the content. People have spent an average of 1.58 attention minutes on auto native content, nearly 2x higher than any other industry.

Social Engagement is the ratio of social actions: sharing, liking or commenting on a piece of content. It evaluates the campaign’s performance in attracting people’s interests to interact with the content. Auto campaigns have a relatively low engagement ratio in general. For the Automotive industry, we’re seeing an average engagement rate of 5.5%.

Earned Impressions Ratio is the percentage of impressions that arise from a share over the total number of times people have viewed the content. Auto brands have a slightly lower earned impressions ratio than Nudge overall benchmarks. We’re seeing an average Earned Impression Rate of 6.8% across the Automotive industry.

Distribution Insights

  • Desktop for 54% of total traffic, mobile for 29%, and tablet for 17%.
  • When publishers are going to use their own internal native distribution, make sure they tag the
    content, so you can monitor performance. Not all native units perform equally.
  • If a publisher is including social distribution, make sure these aren’t dark posts but come from the publisher’s account, backed by additional distribution budget.
  • Newsletters from the publisher are a great add on, driving 2x higher attention than other sources.

Publisher Insights

  • Thrillist is a leading online lifestyle media publication, covering how to best spend time and money across the lifestyle categories people care about most. It covers food, drink, travel, and entertainment.

Content Insights

  • Most popular content themes include topics related to travel, food and safety. Fewer articles focus on automotive itself.
  • The brands generally have a strong presence on the content sites, and readers can identify the products easily.
  • The content formats are mostly lists, custom features, and videos. Lists are the most engaging format for this category, closely followed by Custom Features.
  • Custom Features perform well in this category, they’re slightly different from the normal layout of a publishers site, it can include parallax, interactive content, video, and sound.
  • Content hubs perform poorly, which is consistent across industries. They achieve lower engagement and lower attention than sponsored articles, placed within a publishers newsfeed.

Social Insights

  • Facebook is the current primary platform for social engagement in entertainment campaigns. It accounted for the highest social shares and generated 80% of earned impressions as organic traffic.
  • Twitter is the second best performing social media channel, driving strong earned impressions. In 2016 Twitter closed access to their API, which means that unless a user hits the Twitter share button on the page, no one is able to detect the share count.

Best Practices


KIA Motors launched an article and video on British GQ to promote KIA Stinger model.

There is a strong brand presence on the page, with noticeable logos at multiple places and clean product images. The brand and the product were mentioned multiple times throughout the video as well.

The social media icons were well-selected, including not only Facebook and Twitter, but Pinterest due to the abundant photos in the content.
http://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/article/kia-stinger-street-style-nyc


Lincoln recently launched a content campaign on The New York Times in Q2 2017.

The content discussed the artisanship of Lincoln cars by associating it with other classic artists and craftsmanship products.

The content is interesting and innovative.
https://paidpost.nytimes.com/lincoln/at-the-apex-of-artisanship-living-luxury-in-a-modern- world.html


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