Inside a Native Advertising Agency: The 7-Step Workflow (2026)

Most agencies that promise you Taboola and Outbrain results are Facebook shops with a native side hustle. They run 60, 70, 80 people across every channel and treat native as an afterthought. That is exactly why their native campaigns stall at break-even.

We built the opposite. A 15-person team that does nothing but native — no Facebook, no Google, no print, ever. Below is the exact production line a client moves through, from the first sales call to the moment a campaign goes live on Taboola or Outbrain. Steal it.

Why a native-only agency runs differently

I'm Marcel Sattler, founder of native-advertising.net, and since 2015 I've deployed more than $100M across Taboola, Outbrain, Newsbreak, MGID, Yahoo Native, Mediago, and RevContent for DTC, lead-gen, and affiliate clients. That is the only thing this team does.

The reason native demands a dedicated team is the funnel. A native funnel is not a Facebook funnel with the logo swapped out. You do not send cold traffic straight to a product page. You send it to an advertorial — an editorial-style page that pre-sells the offer — and only then to the checkout or lead form. That middle layer is where most agencies fail, because they have never built one at scale.

So instead of hiring generalists, we hire people who learn one thing: how native works, end to end. We run a hybrid model — a handful of people in our office in Graz, Austria, and a large international team working remote from the US, Israel, and elsewhere. If you want a team built around your native funnel specifically, that starts at /contact.

We decline 8 of 10 requests before any work begins

Sales is the first contact point, and the job is not to close everyone. It is to qualify out the bad fits fast.

We get a lot of inbound. People Google "native advertising agency," and there are very few of us, so the requests pile up — "I have a store, can you run our ads," "I want leads, can you run our ads." Roughly 8 out of 10 of those get declined. The product or service simply is not a good fit for native, and we will not sign a contract we cannot scale profitably.

That number is not a flex. It is risk management. When we sign, we are committing to scale that account fast and profitably — fast enough that the client makes money and so do we. The only way to keep that promise is to say no to the 80% where the math does not work. If you are not sure which bucket your offer lands in, our DTC and dropship play is at /solutions/ecommerce and the lead-gen play is at /solutions/lead-gen.

Step 1-2: Sales qualifies, then project management builds the concept

Once a client clears sales and signs, project management takes over and does the heavy thinking up front so nobody has to improvise later.

The project manager sets up the infrastructure, builds the board in our project management tool, and writes the concept: which approaches we run, which angles we test, and which KPIs matter for this specific account. Angles are the part people underestimate. One product carries several — a family approach, an environmental approach, two or three others — and each angle gets its own advertorials and ads.

The rule here is simple: decide everything in step one, then execute without second-guessing. We define the tasks clearly and structurally before any work starts, so when copywriters and designers pick up their assignments, nobody is asking "does this make sense?" mid-build. We already answered that. The project manager then breaks the concept into assigned tasks for every downstream role.

Step 3: Copywriting produces a stack of advertorials per angle

Launching a new client is copy-heavy. For each angle, we need a lot of advertorials — not one, a stack.

We write short advertorials, medium advertorials, long advertorials, soft-approach pieces, hard-approach pieces, informative advertorials, and emotional advertorials. Different headlines, different lengths, different framings, all mapped to the angles the project manager defined. That volume is what gives the campaign enough to test against once it is live.

Our copywriters have a marketing background and a psychological one, and they research heavily. We get information from the client, but we also dig through the internet to find the audience's real pains and problems — those exact trigger points are what the copy is built to hit. Nothing ships on the copywriter's say-so; every advertorial goes back to the project manager for approval before it moves on.

Step 4: Web design builds the advertorials and wires the tracking

Approved copy goes to web design, who turn text into the actual pages and handle everything you see — and everything you don't.

On the surface, they build each advertorial as a real page: copy laid in, images added and edited, formatting clean, load behavior handled so the page is fast. If the client has no Shopify store or offer page of their own, web design builds that too.

Under the surface is where the money is tracked. Web design installs the tracking scripts and the Taboola and Outbrain pixels so we can attribute a purchase or a lead back to the ad. We are not doing arbitrage here — these are performance campaigns where the end result is a sale in the shop or a generated lead. Because we run a dedicated tracker, iOS 14 is a non-issue; we still track almost everything, including iOS purchases. Every finished advertorial produces URLs that the project manager loads into the tracker. The platform-specific setup for each network lives on pages like /taboola-agency and /outbrain-agency.

Step 5: Ad creation — finding the peak between CTR and conversion rate

With pages built, we create the ads: combinations of images and headlines, different sets for different angles.

Native headlines are not the scammy clickbait people assume. We are not writing "the three smallest bikinis of the Kardashian family spotted on the beach." That headline prints a huge CTR and zero buyers, and it does not match the advertorial behind it. The job is to find the peak point — a headline with a high click-through rate that also holds a strong conversion rate, and that flows naturally into the advertorial so the reader keeps going on the topic they actually clicked for.

That balance is the whole game in performance native. CTR with no conversion burns budget; conversion with no CTR never scales. We build the ad set to live where both hold. The affiliate and DTC angles for this are at /solutions/affiliates and /solutions/ecommerce.

Step 6-7: Test everything, then go live

Before anything spends, the project manager tests the full stack with the team — confirming tracking fires correctly and every event, including iOS purchases, is attributable end to end.

Only when the project manager approves do we contact the client and go live. By that point we have the advertorials, the URLs in the tracker, the ads, and the offer pages all assembled and verified. Going live is the easy part; the verification before it is what protects the spend.

Supporting all of this is a back office and a finance team. Finance owns the billing but also watches account spend and credit lines across platforms with a precise eye — because an agency is still a company with cash flow to manage. And I'm still in the trenches: I hire, I acquire clients, I speak on stages, I run this YouTube channel, and I actively set up projects, write headlines, and deep-dive campaign analysis. I refuse to be a CEO who has lost contact with the core business.

One more operational note: we are fully remote across multiple time zones, and we minimize live calls on purpose. Tools like Loom and Slack let us communicate async instead of putting eight people in a Zoom where only two talk. That is how a 15-person team moves fast without drowning in meetings.

Watch the full breakdown

Is your account a fit for the same play?

If you are running DTC, dropshipping, lead-gen, or affiliate offers and want them on Taboola or Outbrain, the first question is the same one our sales team asks: is the offer a fit for native? Eight of ten that come to us are not — and we would rather tell you that early than burn your budget proving it.

Book a qualification call at /contact. If you want to see what this workflow produces in the wild first, the numbers are in /case-studies, and every video and post we publish is at /resources.