Native Ads Best Practices

Getting the most out of your native ads on MoPub Marketplace

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

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 lays out itself.

For direct-sold ads, publishers can define additional fields that are sent down to the client as well.

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

Important Note: The star rating will not be present with every ad, so your ad design should be able to correctly handle the case where a rating does not exist.

1. 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.

2. Include at least the title and image or icon

Your ad format must contain at least the title and the native ad’s image or icon. Beyond those two required elements, we suggest 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.

3. 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. Do not shorten this title. You may convert it to uppercase if appropriate for your design.

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

• The image provided by the advertiser is 1200x627 px in size. You may scale down this image to fit your ad format down to 300x157 px while maintaining the aspect ratio of W/H=1.91. You may not crop the image or change the aspect ratio.

• The icon provided by the advertiser is 80x80 px in size. You may scale down this image to fit your ad format while maintaining the aspect ratio of W/H=1. You may not crop the image or change the aspect ratio.

4. Don’t Overlap

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

5. Use AdPlacer 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 custom 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 and also pre-cache ads so that you don’t make too many ad requests, and the user’s scrolling is responsive.

For more details, go to the Native Ads Location Control page.

6. Test your integration with a direct campaign

The MoPub Marketplace will 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

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.

See also:

What are Native Ads?
Native Integration Overview
How to Integrate MoPub Native Ads
Native Ad Direct Serving
Native Ad Network Mediation