If you work in PR, there’s a good chance native ads live in a slightly foggy part of your world.
They’re “in the plan,” usually handled by a media agency or the paid team. Someone mentions Taboola, Outbrain, maybe some in-feed formats. A few weeks later, you see a slide with impressions, clicks, and a vague line about “supporting awareness.”
You’re supposed to nod, accept that it helped, and move on.
But PR doesn’t have to treat content discovery channels as a black box. You can borrow a handful of habits from performance marketers—clear hypotheses, simple tests, and a bit of discipline—and finally understand which native networks genuinely amplify your stories and which just eat budget.
Let’s walk through how to do that without turning yourself into a media trader.
Why native ad networks actually belong in the PR mix
Native advertising has been formalized for years now. The IAB Native Advertising Playbook describes formats that blend into surrounding content recommendation widgets, in-feed articles, sponsored posts—so long as they’re clearly labeled and contextually relevant. That’s a lot closer to how PR thinks about audiences than a banner screaming “Buy now!” ever will.
On the platform side, Google’s ad experience guidance highlights that native formats can create less disruptive, more immersive experiences when they’re aligned with the “form and function” of the content around them—something PR people care about instinctively because it impacts trust and perception. You can see this thinking in resources like Google Ad Manager’s creating better ad experiences guide, which talks about native ads as part of a better overall user journey rather than just another slot to fill.
For PR teams, that opens up several useful roles for native networks:
- Extending the life of earned hits.
When you land a strong byline or feature that really nails your message, native placements can keep that story in front of fresh readers for weeks instead of days. - Reaching pockets your media list doesn’t fully cover.
Maybe you’re strong in national business press but light in niche trades, regional outlets, or certain international markets. Native lets you appear in those environments while your relationships catch up. - Testing narratives before you go big.
Performance marketers A/B test headlines, angles, and visuals all the time. You can treat native as a low-risk lab: see which storylines audiences actually click and read before you hang a product launch or executive speech on a single angle.
Instead of thinking, “That’s paid, not my job,” it’s more useful to see native networks as an extra rail in your PESO mix—one you can influence and evaluate, not just inherit.
Start like a performance marketer: with a PR-first hypothesis
Performance teams rarely say, “Let’s just run some ads and see what happens.” They start with a hypothesis: who they want to reach, what behavior they want, and why a channel might help.
PR can do the same thing, in language that feels natural to comms.
Try framing your hypothesis with three pieces:
- Audience: the specific group you’re trying to reach beyond your current coverage.
Example: operations leaders at mid-market retailers in North America. - Outcome: the PR-friendly result you care about.
Example: more time spent reading a supply chain resilience explainer, more downloads of a research report, more people exposed to your stance on a controversial issue. - Mechanism: how you expect native to help.
Example: by putting your content adjacent to relevant news they already read, in a format that feels like editorial rather than an intrusive ad.
A simple hypothesis might look like this:
“If we promote our inflation risk white paper through content discovery widgets on finance and business news sites, new visitors will spend at least 40% more time on the report than visitors arriving from generic display campaigns.”
Once that’s written, you’re not “boosting a piece.” You’re running an experiment with a clear pass/fail test.
Shortlist networks like a partner, not a passenger
This is usually where PR gets sidelined: a network gets chosen because the agency has history with it, or because “that’s what we used last year.”
You don’t have to pick the network alone, but you should have a structured opinion. A simple vetting process might look like this:
- Match inventory to your media universe.
Which publishers and verticals does the network actually reach? A B2B SaaS brand will care about tech and business titles; a consumer brand might prioritize lifestyle, entertainment, and local news. Ask for concrete examples, not just broad categories. - Check that the format fits with your content.
Are you promoting deep explainers, short blog posts, research reports, or video? Make sure the network supports formats that work with the assets you’re willing to promote—not just the cheapest widgets. - Use external intel to sharpen your questions.
Performance marketers publish a lot of competitive analysis. A resource like PropellerAds’ breakdown of Taboola alternatives can help you understand how different discovery platforms position themselves, which geos they’re strong in, and what kinds of campaigns they tend to favor. You’re not trying to become a buyer; you’re using that intel to ask smarter questions about where your brand should appear. - Put brand safety and disclosure requirements on the table early.
As PR, you’re responsible for reputation. You need clarity on labeling (“Sponsored,” “Advertiser Content”), adjacency controls, exclusion lists, and how the network handles sensitive topics. One bad screenshot of your content next to something toxic can undo a lot of careful work.
By the end of this step, your goal is to have two or three networks that look credible for your audience and story, not just “big in general.”
Design a small, clean test you can actually run
You don’t need a huge budget or a data science team. You just need to keep the experiment tight enough that you can attribute differences to the network, not random noise.
Fix what you can control
Start by holding a few things steady:
- One primary content asset.
Use the same article, report landing page, or explainer across all networks so you’re not comparing apples to oranges. - Consistent creative.
Choose one or two headline + image combinations and run them across each network. You can layer in creative testing later; for now, you’re testing placements. - Clean tracking.
Use consistent UTM parameters or tracking templates. That way, when you pull analytics, you can see clearly which network drove which traffic and feed that into the structured approach outlined in Agility’s measuring PR ROI best practices.
Change the thing you’re actually testing: the network
Then, allocate an equal, modest budget to each network for a fixed window—say, two to three weeks.
You’re not trying to crown a forever winner on day one. You’re looking for directional signals:
- Does Network A deliver more clicks but shorter sessions?
- Does Network B send fewer visitors, but with higher time on page and deeper scroll?
- Does Network C seem to over-index in a region or device type your comms team cares about?
Those patterns are enough to make smarter decisions about where to invest more heavily—and where to pull back.
Use metrics that make sense to PR
Performance marketers care about CPA and ROAS. You might not have those numbers, or even need them.
Instead, anchor your test on metrics that tell a story about attention and behavior:
- Engagement: time on page, scroll depth, bounce rate, exit rate.
- Content actions: downloads, newsletter signups, registrations—things tied to your thought leadership funnel.
- Assisted impact: sessions that start with native and later show up in paths to requests, inquiries, or other outcomes your leadership already tracks.
If you’re already using a media monitoring and analytics stack similar to what’s laid out in Agility’s media monitoring ultimate guide, you can also line up native test windows with coverage peaks and sentiment changes to see how amplification plays into the broader narrative.
Read the results through a PR lens, not just a dashboard
Numbers on their own don’t convince executives; stories do. Your job is to translate the metrics into something that feels like communications insight, not just campaign reporting.
Start from what people actually trust
Most leaders instinctively know that people trust recommendations and editorial more than ads. Studies like Nielsen’s research on trust in advertising have quantified that gap for years, showing word-of-mouth and editorial content beating many paid formats.
Native advertising sits in the middle: paid, but content-shaped.
So if you see that:
- Visitors from Network B spend significantly more time reading an issues-focused op-ed than visitors from standard display campaigns. You can argue that content-like placements are a better fit for that story.
- One network has great click-through but terrible engagement, which tells you the way your content is being framed might be over-promising and under-delivering—something that can hurt credibility if left unchecked.
You can frame those insights in PR terms:
- “When we amplify our sustainability report through Network X, new readers from that source spend almost twice as long on the page as those from other paid campaigns.”
- “Network Y drives lots of curiosity clicks, but readers leave quickly—if we keep using it, we should adjust headlines and landing copy to better match expectations.”
Plug native into the broader measurement story
The goal isn’t to bolt on a whole new reporting system. It’s to slot native into the model you already have.
If you’re tracking a mix of outputs, outtakes, and outcomes, native amplification fits neatly:
- Outputs: impressions and clicks generated by each network.
- Outtakes: whether people consumed the content and took light actions (sharing, saving, signing up).
- Outcomes: whether those sessions appear in journeys that end in behaviors your leadership already values.
When you line this up with your monitoring stack and ROI frameworks from resources like the media monitoring guide, it’s much easier to show that native isn’t “just ads”—it’s one way PR drives measurable behavior.
Use native test results to sharpen SEO and content strategy
There’s a quiet side benefit to all this: native tests generate real-world feedback on which messages and angles actually land.
If certain headlines, hooks, or themes consistently outperform across networks, that’s gold for your content and SEO roadmap. You’re learning what strangers will actually stop and read, not just what sounds good internally.
Your search and content partners can use that to:
- Prioritize topics that drive engaged traffic from cold audiences.
- Refine keyword targets around phrases that clearly resonate in real-world placements.
- Decide which explainer pages or cornerstone assets deserve more investment, expansion, and outreach.
That aligns neatly with guidance like Agility’s piece on
How to align PR and SEO for search visibility. Instead of guessing which narratives to optimize and pitch hardest, you’re coming in with evidence from actual readers.
Turning experiments into lasting confidence
The final step is socializing what you’ve learned, so native testing becomes part of “how we do PR,” not a one-off experiment.
When you take results back to your CMO, CEO, or leadership team:
- Tell a straightforward before/after story.
“Previously, we just put launch content into one discovery network and hoped. This time, we tested three, and here’s where we saw real engagement from the people we care about.” - Highlight what you stopped funding.
“We shifted budget away from the network that drove shallow visits and doubled down on the one that produced deep reads and more action.” Cutting low-value activity is often more persuasive than any single success metric. - Connect the dots to reputation and relationships.
“This isn’t about chasing clicks. It’s about getting our best thinking in front of the right people, in environments they already trust, and proving that attention leads to behavior we care about.”
Over time, that story changes how native shows up inside your organization. It stops being a mysterious line item and becomes a deliberate tool PR uses to extend and validate the stories you’re already proud to tell.
You don’t need to live inside an ad dashboard to act more like a performance marketer. You just need to think in hypotheses, run small, clean tests, and read the results in a way that supports the bigger narrative about how PR moves audiences.
Once you do that, you’re no longer guessing which native ad network “probably helped.” You’ll know which channels truly amplify your work and you’ll have the confidence to invest, tweak, or walk away accordingly.
