Facebook introduces three new native ad tools on its native ads format

Facebook has announced a slew of improvements to its Native ad products, which form a crucial part of its Audience Network.

“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,” the company said.

Audience Network by Facebook was launched a year ago, on 30 April 2014, and its function is to improve the relevance of adverts inside mobile apps by extending the reach of existing Facebook campaigns beyond Facebook and helping developers and publishers monetize their apps. Facebook says that this service became an instant success such that since October 2014, the number of apps in the network has increased by five-fold.

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The improvement to native ads is informed by intensive research, Facebook says. In this research the company found out that native ads are far more engaging. The research also shed light on what kind of ads the average user engages with. It found that banner ads tend to be ignored and poorly placed ads, especially those that pop up when a user first opens an app, have a negative effect on the user’s experience and engagement. The effects of these pop up ads also affect how users interact with future ads regardless of how well designed the new ads are.

Ads that do well, Facebook found, are ads that are well integrated within an app design and not destruct from the flow with which a user navigates said app. These ads stand a better chance of catching a user’s attention, more so than other ads.

Publishers and developers need not despair as Facebook is introducing three new tools for them to implement native ad formats.

These tools include

Native Ad Templates: By using these native ad templates, publishers can define characteristics such as font, ad height, background colour, 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: 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.

Horizontal Scroll For Native Ads: Horizontal ad scroll view leverages the native ads manager and either a native ad template or publisher defined UI view. Facebook is adding h-scroll support within the native ads manager.