The hardtracking staff may soon be out of business if we keep seeing headlines like this one (via MediaPost):

Marketers Still Not Sold On Native Advertising

Nut graf:

What’s really keeping more marketers from going native is a lack of quality content, continued measurement issues and the category’s perceived inability to trade programmatically.

(Not to mention our total inability to say what “trade programmatically” means. But we can say that native ads are the ones tricked out to look just like editorial content – you know, ads in sheep’s clothing.)

The MediaPost piece cites research from DMR and TripleLift, but more telling are these numbers from Contently’s new research report, A Crisis of Confidence: The State of Content Marketing Measurement.

• 90% of marketers expressed uncertainty that their key content metrics are effective in measuring business results.

• 73% of marketers identified Brand Awareness as a goal of their content.

• 69% of marketers said that they were using pageviews/unique visitors to measure the success of their content, while less than half are examining time on site. Yet, 50% of respondents expressed a desire to be able to measure how much real attention people are paying to their content.

• 7% of respondents are not measuring the success of their content in any way.

Tip o’ the pixel to Digiday for these helpful charts:

So, to recap: Nine out of ten stealth marketers recommend . . . something else.

Kind of hopeful, no?

John R. Carroll is media analyst for NPR's Here & Now and senior news analyst for WBUR in Boston. He also writes at Campaign Outsider and It's Good to Live in a Two-Daily Town.
John R. Carroll has 305 post(s) on Sneak Adtack