A guide to native content success in partnership with The Atlantic.

 
Nudge's and The Atlantic's logos
 
Native content is a fast-growing industry. Many brands are looking to scale their initiatives and there is a greater emphasis on demonstrating success.
 
Nudge works with partners to delivery transparency and efficiency in content advertising, banners were a simpler paradigm for advertisers and content has introduced new challenges.
 
Read on for how, in partnership with The Atlantic, Nudge demonstrated what people do after they read the content. This is an important datapoint for all campaigns. It is the proof point of reaching the right audience, the quality of the content and the ability to persuade.
 
This document includes references to Nudge metrics, you can read more about their definitions and how we collect them at giveitanudge.com.
 

Campaign highlights

 
Each distribution source has its own nuances in delivery, device context, and usage. The impact of this on the content and post-content consumption can often be hidden within the noise. Nudge sorted through this to provide clear indicators where air is escaping the system and how to stop it.
 

The partnership

 
The Atlantic are a leading publisher in the native content space. They wanted to extend their offering to brands with new tools allowing them to measure attribution – what happens after people read the content. With native advertising estimated to reach 75% of The Atlantic ad revenue, no stone is left unturned in demonstrating the value of the content and their audience.
 
Nudge is a Native Content Platform that lets brands, agencies and publishers manage, measure & optimize their native content campaigns. In the market for almost 3 years, they’ve helped clients such as GE, Visa, Converse, and Don Julio prove the success of their native content campaigns.
 

How it worked

 
Nudge was installed across a sponsored campaign on The Atlantic and a pixel was placed on the client’s site. The data for both the consumption of content and conversions were then displayed in real-time on the Nudge dashboard.
 

Backing the winners

 
By integrating Nudge, The Atlantic was able to consolidate the data across all pieces of content to fully understand (in real-time) the effectiveness of the campaign. Letting them find and back the winners. This included:
 

  • Which piece of content was driving the most conversions.
  • Which of their distribution partners were driving the highest conversions.
  • What the average time to convert was, were people clicking through to the brand site immediately or were they coming back later otherwise known as ‘viewthrough conversions’.

Access to this data put The Atlantic in the driver’s seat to optimize content & distribution.
 

Content Insights

 
With one piece of content accounting for almost 40% of all conversions Nudge dug into the data to share insights for the next content campaign. This piece of content had:

  • 30% higher scroll rate.
  • 20% more attention.
  • 23% higher engagement.
  • 3.8 times higher virality.

 
High social engagement and attention created the perfect storm for maximizing conversion. The attention and scroll were 20-30% higher than the campaign norm, social engagement was 23% higher and virality almost 4 times higher than the average.
 
It’s important to make sure that your content is performing well across social and attention metrics, together these give you the greatest indicator of conversion success.

 

“Nudge is an easy-to-use product, they offer great support and had a deep understanding of our client needs and the market.” – Lindsey Emanuel – Executive Director, Business Operations at The Atlantic

 

You can download the PDF version of this case study, here.


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