Videos in Advertorials: 5 Ways to Lift Native CTR (2026)

Your advertorial has one job: sell the next click. If the reader bounces before they reach the link to your Shopify page, your sales page, or your lead form, every dollar you spent on Taboola or Outbrain traffic is gone. The fastest fix I keep coming back to is the cheapest one — drop a video into the body of the page.

There is no single secret to a high-converting advertorial. It's a stack of things working together, and video is one of the most underused pieces of that stack. A converting video takes 15 to 20 minutes to build, and in the majority of accounts I test, it beats the text-only version on click-through. Here are the five reasons it works.

Marcel Sattler, founder of native-advertising.net, has deployed more than $100M across Taboola, Outbrain, Newsbreak, MGID, Yahoo Native, Mediago, and RevContent since 2015, running performance campaigns for DTC, lead-gen, and affiliate advertisers. The patterns below come straight from that ad spend.

Why does a video in your advertorial raise CTR?

A native advertorial has three tasks. It informs the prospect about the product or service. It lets that prospect decide — no, I don't need this, or yes, I want it. And it sells the next click to the offer page. Video makes all three jobs easier because it catches attention better than a wall of text.

People are different learning types. If you read a lot of books, you absorb written copy easily. If you live on YouTube, you learn faster from video and audio. If you're a podcast listener, you remember things you hear. Most people are a blend — but the majority skew visual, and that skew is getting stronger as short-form video on TikTok and social trains everyone to expect the next peak of attention every few seconds.

The native audience runs a little older, but the same shift is happening there. A video inside an otherwise classic editorial catches the people a text block would lose and keeps them reading. That's a higher CTR on the in-content link, which is the click that actually matters.

One hack: don't embed a plain video. Use a player with an animated thumbnail — the kind you get from Loom or Vidalytics — instead of a static YouTube or Vimeo embed. The moving thumbnail is far more interactive and pulls more clicks into the player. If you're running e-commerce traffic, this is one of the first things I'd test on a DTC advertorial.

Reason 2: multimodal content appeals to more learning styles

The second reason is multimodal content. When you combine text, images, and video on one page, you cover every learning style instead of betting the whole page on one. The reader who skims, the reader who watches, and the reader who listens all get a path through your message.

We're also testing a small audio play. Add a tiny media field at the top of the advertorial with an AI-generated voiceover that reads the written copy word for word. With today's AI tools that's about five minutes of work, and a real slice of readers click it. Stacking text, images, video, and audio makes the page accessible to a wider audience — and a wider audience that understands your offer converts at a higher rate.

This matters most in native because you're working with a broad cold audience. They don't know your product, they don't know your service, and they may not even realize they have the problem yet. The advertorial's job is to make that problem visible. More ways in means more of them get there. If you're buying Taboola or Outbrain traffic at scale, that breadth is the whole game.

Reason 3: better information retention

The third reason is retention. Studies show people remember a message far better when it's delivered as a mix of text, video, and audio than as a single asset. More retention means more clarity, and more clarity at the moment of decision means a higher conversion rate.

Retention starts with how you write, not just what you add. Our copywriters keep sentences short and cut every fancy word, because the reader is fighting distractions — a TV in the background, a WhatsApp notification, a second tab. You're always competing for attention, so the copy has to be instantly understandable.

Short sentences do part of that work. Layering in different media does the rest. Both are proven to make the page easier to digest, and an easier page lifts CTR on the next click. This is true whether you're warming up a cold buyer for a lead-gen form or an affiliate offer.

Reason 4: video carries emotion text can't

The fourth reason is storytelling. Video transports emotion and atmosphere in a way static copy never reaches, because a moving image carries expression, tone, and mood on top of the words.

Run the test yourself. Open a movie trailer — a James Bond trailer works — and mute it. Same effects, same actors, same cuts, but with the audio gone the emotional pull collapses. Then play it with sound. The intensity jumps. That gap is exactly what you're adding when you put video into an advertorial: not just the message, but the feeling behind it.

For a cold native audience that hasn't decided they need anything, emotion is what moves them from passive reader to buyer. That's why I lean on video for affiliate and DTC pages where the product needs to feel desirable, not just explained.

Reason 5: it's fast and cheap to produce

The fifth reason is the easiest to act on: video is cheap to make now. Canva, CapCut, and dozens of phone apps build a converting video in 15 to 20 minutes. Many are free, and there's plenty of free YouTube content showing you exactly how.

Done is better than perfect. The goal isn't a cinema-grade trailer — it's a video that converts your audience into buyers. Spend 30 minutes, produce one video, and ship it. The bar is performance, not polish.

If you already run advertorials on MGID, RevContent, or Mediago, this is a same-day test. Build one video, run a split test of video versus text-only, and let the click-through data decide.

What the split test usually shows

In the accounts I've tested, I don't have a single case where adding video produced a negative result. Sometimes the video and text-only versions land close to even. But in the majority of tests, CTR comes out higher with video.

That asymmetry is the reason to test it. The downside is roughly flat, the upside is a real CTR lift, and the cost of finding out is 15 to 20 minutes of production plus a split test. A higher in-content CTR flows straight through to a better return on ad spend and a cheaper CPA, because you're sending more qualified, more educated clicks to the offer page. You can see how that compounds across our case studies.

Watch the full breakdown

Where to go from here

Pick one advertorial that's already getting traffic, build a single video in 15 to 20 minutes, add an animated-thumbnail player, and split test it against the text-only page. Let CTR pick the winner. That's the whole experiment, and the downside risk is close to zero.

If you'd rather have a team that's tested this across $100M+ in spend run it for you, book a strategy call. Tell us your platform and vertical and we'll tell you whether video is the right next lever — or which part of your advertorial stack to fix first.