Facebook Enhances Audience Network Native Ad Tools

Approximately one year ago, Facebook launched “Audience Network,” its mobile ad network that helps extend marketers’ reach outside of Facebook. Now, the company has announced the addition of three new tools to help marketers optimize native ads further.

In its announcement, the social media giant explains that its research indicates that people strongly prefer native ads and find them more engaging than standard banners. The company explains that more than half of developer revenue from Audience Network comes from native formats, with publishers seeing 7 times higher CPMs for native ads in comparison to standard banners.

Facebook’s announcement included the following explanation for launching the new ad tools:

“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.”

Facebook’s new native ad templates are based on native ad best practices and common ad format sizes. These templates provide advertisers with the ability to change native ads quickly and easily. Dealerships can now more easily make their ad formats fit better with the app’s natural user experience, which is known to be highly beneficial, while defining characteristics including font, ad height, background color, button boarder treatment, and more.

The company provided the following example of what these native ad formats look like within an app:

The new native ad management tool provides marketers with an effective method to manage multiple native ad requests, in order to ensure that the highest performing ad is delivered at the right time to the right person. The new native ads manager will automatically optimize for the highest performing ads, and marketers can pre-fetch up to 10 ads and deliver them in the best order ranked by yield.

To help advertisers maximize the number of ads shown in the app without increasing the overall number of placements, Facebook has added a horizontal scroll native template that is easy to implement, and has also added horizontal support within the native ads manager. For dealerships and other marketers, this type of ad experience has the potential to increase engagement by offering a richer amount of information.

The following is an example of the horizontal scroll ad format:

Overall, Facebook’s new ad tools make it easier for marketers to customize the components of their native ads to best fit the app’s natural experience, while enhancing the ability to optimize their campaigns with the native ads manager.