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 an 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
• On average, a 1000 pixel increase in both height and width of a thumbnail will increase CTR for native display units by 0.4% and Video View Rate on native video placements by 20%

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%