How to Create a Direct Native Ads Campaign

Create an Ad Unit for your native ad

Typically, you will create one Ad Unit per type of ad you’d like to display in an app. For example, if you want to have a banner ad on one screen and a native ad in another, you’d create an Ad Unit for each type. You can create a new “native ad” Ad Unit in the MoPub UI. To do so, go to the Inventory tab in the MoPub dashboard, select your app, and select Add an Ad Unit. You’ll notice that Native is now an option in the Add Ad Unit dialog box.

Publishers can create a native ad unit by adding a new ad unit, selecting “native” from the list and targeting a line item with a native ad creative at the ad unit.

NOTE: There is no refresh interval for native ads because we don’t have control over when the request for the ad is made.

Create an Order and Line Item for your native ad

Once you’ve created an Ad Unit, you will need to create an Order and a Line Item. An Order is a a group of related Line Items, which are also known as “campaigns”. Line Items are campaigns that have different targeting. For example, suppose you want to create different campaigns for different demographics or regions. Each of these campaigns can be created as a separate Line Item, which rolls up into one Order.

To create a campaign to promote your other apps, you would create an Order and Line Item with the type “Promotional”. We recommend naming the Line Item something that is very clear and specific to the ad campaign. In the Targeting section of that Line Item, be sure to select your native ad Ad Unit like below:

Promotional campaigns can help you drive installs or in-app purchases from your users. In addition, developers can apply to use the MoPub Marketplace to let MoPub serve ads in your app from third parties.

Upload a creative for your native ad using the “Easy Form”

Once you have created a native ad Ad Unit and set up targeting for a Line Item, you will want to upload an actual ad or “creative”. To do this, select your Line Item and then select the blue “Add a New Creative” button.

The “Easy Form” contains five native creative fields that correspond to the standard we have defined with our Demand Partners on MoPub Marketplace. This is done to keep direct-sold ads and MoPub Marketplace ad formats consistent.

We recommend using the main five fields. However, many are optional and you should use the ones that best represent your ad. The five fields are:

• Title (Words With Friends)

• Text (Play this word-building puzzle game now!)

• CTA Text (Install)

• Icon Image (Image of an icon for an app, as an example) Recommended size: 80x80

• Main Image (Large image for the advertisement. Screenshot of the game, as an example) Recommended size: 1200x627

Creative Customization

Some publishers will want to add additional fields or images to their creatives. A good example of this would be adding a field for an app’s star rating, since we don’t provide it.

To support this use case, we have added the ability for publishers to add their own fields and additional images, as they like. This can be accomplished by clicking the “Add Field” or “Add Image” buttons.

Manual JSON Entry

​We also have a “Manual Entry” form which allows publishers to insert JSON, if they are creating very custom creatives. When the publisher uses this form, our SDK will make their full JSON available to them, so they can use the data as they like inside of their application.