Placement Location & Design Best Practices

A key to driving native ad performance lies in the location and design of your ad placements. SFP's integration engineers ran a series of month-long tests to determine some best practices for placement location and design. 

Why should you care about ad placement performance? 

• Buyers want to bid on high-performing placement. From our testing, we've confirmed that increases performance metrics lead directly to higher fill rates at higher CPM.
• Direct Sales activity is powered by performance. Wrap reports that showcase high engagement lead to continuing business; proven success with programmatic and other direct deals can help close new accounts.

There are many components to a native ad placement that can impact performance. Highlights from our findings are outlined below:

Thumbnail Size

• Placements with larger thumbnails drive higher CTR for native display units, and higher video view rates for native video units

Description

• Native video ads that feature a description provide the user with more context. We found that including a description with a native video placement had a 10-second video view rate 4% higher than those placements without a description.

Brand Logo

• Allowing advertisers to feature a brand logo within a placement drives immediate brand association with viewers. In our testing, we found that native video placements featuring a brand logo upfront led to 10-second video view rate nearly 8% higher than those placements without a brand logo.

Location

• The closer a placement is to the top of your page, the more likely it is to be viewable to a user. In the case of our testing, moving placements 500 pixels higher on the page lead to an increase in viewability of up to 3.3%

Background Color

• We tested a variety of placement background colors, and found that avoiding a grey background can lead to an increase in CTR of up to 0.5%