Native Ads Best Practices

• Get the Most Out of Your Native Ads
• Required Practices
• Best Practices
• Additional Notes

Get the Most Out of Your Native Ads

Native ads are native to your app’s content format. Instead of giving you a banner or fullscreen image, the creative consists of a number of components that are sent to your app, which the app arranges itself. Impressions for native ads are fired and counted when 1 pixel of the ad is is on screen.

With MoPub’s native ads, publishers control the format of the ads themselves. As a publisher monetizing apps through mediation or MoPub Marketplace, follow these guidelines when you build your own ad format.

For Direct Serve ads, publishers can define additional fields that are sent down to the client.

Refer to our integration instructions for iOS and Android on how to integrate these native ads into your app.

Required Practices

Native ads with MoPub Marketplace deliver great results for publisher and advertiser alike. We require that publishers follow these guidelines so that ads are clearly marked and creative elements are properly displayed, and advertisers can be confident they are buying valuable ad space.

Mark Ads Clearly

MoPub requires that ads are clearly distinguished from the rest of your app’s content. You must include clearly visible text that reads “Promoted,” “Sponsored,” “Ad,” or a localized version thereof.

Note that in MoPub SDK 5.11, publishers can optionally add a “Sponsored” advertiser name. When available, publishers can add this name to the layout. Examples: “Sponsored by [Advertiser]” or “Promoted by [Advertiser].

Include the Title and Image or Icon

Your ad format must contain at least the title and the native ad’s image or icon. After you’ve met those two required elements, we recommend incorporating as many of the native elements as appropriate in the context of what the rest of your app looks like. Giving the user more information helps them decide whether they want to click on the ad.

Don’t Distort or Modify Components

When advertisers buy ads on Marketplace, they expect that their ad creative is accurately represented. You can scale images and icons down, but beyond that, do not distort or modify this creative:

• The title provided by the advertiser can be up to 25 characters long. You may convert it to uppercase if appropriate for your design.

• The text provided by the advertiser can be up to 100 characters. You may not convert it to uppercase.

• The CTA text provided by the advertiser can be up to 15 characters. You may not convert it to uppercase.

• The image provided by the advertiser will be a minimum of 800 x 417 pixels or greater in size. You may scale this image to fit your ad format down to 300 × 157 pixels while maintaining the width-to-height aspect ratio of 1.91. You may not crop the image or change the aspect ratio.

• The icon provided by the advertiser is 80 x 80 pixels or greater (with the same ratio) in size. You may scale down this image to fit your ad format while maintaining the width-to-height aspect ratio of 1. You may not crop the image or change the aspect ratio.

Don’t Overlap

When advertisers buy ads on Marketplace, they expect that images they provide don’t overlap with other elements.

Display the Privacy Information Icon

In line with new industry self-regulatory guidance provided by the DAA, MoPub now requires all native ads to display the privacy information icon and click region. The icon must be at least 20 x 20 pixels and can be placed in any one of the four corners of the ad.

Character Counts for Title, Description, and CTA

For MoPub Marketplace demand, the maximum numbers of characters allowed for these assets are:

• Title: 25 characters
• Description: 100 characters
• CTA: 15 characters  

You can add ellipses (...) after 99 characters, as the 100th character.

For SDK mediated networks, the maximum limits are set by the network itself.

Best Practices

Test Your Integration with a Direct Campaign

The MoPub Marketplace does not always return an ad, so the easiest way to test your integration is with a direct campaign. Once you’re ready for launch, turn off the direct campaign and target the MoPub Marketplace at your native ad unit.

If you don’t want to configure this direct campaign yourself, we have set up an ad unit ID with sample ads: 76a3fefaced247959582d2d2df6f4757.

Use AdPlacer (iOS) or MoPubAdAdapter (Android) with Location Control

Using AdPlacer on iOS or MoPubAdAdapter on Android lets you control the location of your ads after the app has been deployed. While these helper classes do not work for highly customized native ads implementations, they are optimized for apps with news, social, and message streams, in which ads are interspersed with content. They are easy to integrate. Be sure to pre-cache ads so that you don’t make too many ad requests, and the user’s scrolling is responsive.

AdPlacer (iOS) and MoPubAdAdapter discard ads older than four hours. Follow this four-hour expiration if using manual native integration as well.

Check to make sure impressions are firing properly when ads come into view. If your fill rate with AdPlacer (iOS) or MoPubAdAdapter is low, it may be caused by ad positions being too far down in your app’s newsfeed, so that users do not reach them.

Note that we do not currently support carousel style.

For more details, refer to our Native Ads Location Control article.

Additional Notes

Star Rating Asset

We do not currently support the star rating asset in Marketplace native ads. We do provide support for the star rating asset from some SDK mediated ad networks. Check with the specific network to learn if it is supported.

Ad Placement for Mulitiple Sections (iOS)

For iOS, you can configure strong positions if you have multiple sections in your TableView in the UI by stating the section number followed by the position number. Two sections, for example, would look like this: 1.2, 1.4, 1.7, 2.2, 2.4, 2.7.