• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, January 4, 2017

Native ads will become an alternative in 2017 for brands looking to stand out from others. One smart-home company got a head start in 2016, when it ran a Yahoo Native Gemini ad campaign combined with data in the beginning of the year. 

Vivint Smart Home, the largest smart-home services company in North America, worked with Yahoo to drive traffic to the company's Web site and increase adoption of its security and smart-home offerings with a native advertising campaign.

While Vivint has run both Gemini search and native ads on Yahoo, the results of this specific display campaign outperformed industry click-through rate benchmark by 57%, and a 735% lift in sales using strictly display. In this campaign, the company ran tracking in tandem with the native ads.

"These are actual sales resulting from Yahoo native advertising on a last-touch basis," said Quinton Bowen, digital marketing manager at Vivint.

Vivint’s internal tracking technology allowed the company to pinpoint the source of each lead and sale, according to the ad campaign where dollars were invested, Bowen said. 

The campaign began in January 2016 and ran through June 2016, but the length of time it took the company to see a return on its investment is unclear.

In December 2016, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) released 2017 predictions for native advertising based on input from some IAB members. The consensus said mobile video and data would become "game changers" for native advertising.  

While a continued focus on user experience and the look and feel of pages remains significant, some of the more interesting changes: "Pricing models will increasingly move from CPM to CPV models and conversion metrics that put value and premium on engagement" and there will be more of a focus and attention to metrics, such as gaze and time spent.

Lingering challenges include ad blocking, increasing publisher reliance on paid social or content discovery tools and challenging metrics and measurements related to walled gardens on third-party sites.