Native Ads Made Easy

A little more than a year ago, we introduced the Audience Network — which improves the relevance of ads inside mobile apps by extending the reach of existing Facebook campaigns beyond Facebook and helping developers and publishers monetize their apps. And it's been growing at a rapid rate. Since October 2014, the number of apps in the network has increased by 5X.

But the best part of Audience Network is its native ad format. Native ads allow publishers to create custom ad experiences in their apps that maximize yield and user experience. Today, more than half of developer revenue from Audience Network comes from native formats, and publishers are seeing 7x higher CPMs for native ads when compared to standard banners.

More importantly, though, we've learned that people prefer native ads and find them more engaging. Based on internal research we conducted with average app users, we learned:

• Banner ads tend to be ignored: People have trained themselves not to look at the top or bottom of an app - the most common locations for standard banner formats.
• Integrated ads outperform: An ad that is well integrated within the app design and naturally fits into the user flow has a much better opportunity of catching a user's attention and ultimately leads to higher conversion rates.
• Poor ad experiences have a negative effect on engagement: Poorly placed ads, especially those that pop up when a user first opens an app, have an adverse effect on user experience and engagement, including lower interaction rates with future ads — even when those ads are well designed.

To build off all of this, today we're introducing new native-focused tools to help publishers more easily implement native ad formats: native ad templates, native ad management tools, and horizontal scrolling for native ads.

Native Ad Templates

Our new native ad templates are based on common ad format sizes and native ad best practices. By using these native ad templates, publishers can define characteristics such as font, ad height, background color, button boarder treatment, and a variety of other properties to make ad formats more in-line with the app's natural user experience.

Native Ad Management Tools

We're also providing a new way to manage multiple native ad requests to ensure that the highest performing ad is delivered at the right time to the right person. Instead of designing a system to cache and deliver native assets, a publisher can pass control to the new native ads manager to handle this functionality, which will automatically optimize for highest performing ads. With the native ads manager, publishers can pre-fetch up to 10 ads and deliver them in the best order ranked by yield.

Horizontal Scroll For Native Ads

We've heard from publishers that they want help building and optimizing a horizontal scroll — or as some call it, h-scroll — ad experience to increase ad engagement and maximize the number of ads shown in the app without increasing the overall number of placements. So we're introducing an easy to implement h-scroll custom native template, as well as adding h-scroll support within the native ads manager.

Learn More

To learn more about how all of these new native ad tools can improve yield and users experience for your app, visit our native ads mobile monetization page.