Diving letter:
- Google has rolled out native AdSense ads that look and feel like the ad serving website, the company said in a blog post.
- The native ad format comes in three categories: In-Feed, In-Article, and Matched Content. The ads contain elements such as an improved user experience with high resolution images and longer titles and descriptions. They are also designed to look and feel great on different screen sizes while being easy to use via editing tools.
- The in-feed and in-article formats are available to all publishers, and the matched content format is available to publishers who meet the eligibility criteria based on the volume of traffic and the number of individual pages.
Dive Insight:
Native advertising has increased for a number of reasons, including that consumers are looking for less intrusive advertising experiences, while publishers are looking for ways to better monetize their content for mobile users. A recent report from eMarketer shows that native digital display ads will account for more than half of all digital display advertising spending in the US this year.
The AdSense News is clearly an attempt by Google to support publishers’ efforts to incorporate native advertising. The announcement is also to be seen against the background of the fact that both Google AMP and Facebook Instant Articles, which are mobile content platforms, do not come from publishers who are reluctant to give up a significant level of control over the content warm embrace experience content they produce.
The Google post points out that the three different types of AdSense Native Ads can be placed together or separately depending on the publisher’s strategy. In-feed ads appear on lists of articles or products, in-article ads appear between paragraphs of pages, and ads with content recommendations appear just below articles.
The post doesn’t address one major problem with native advertising – since the ads are similar to the website they appear on, they need to be properly and clearly labeled as ads or sponsored content. In this case, Google put the word “ad” in a contrasting colored square at the beginning of the ad’s line of text in an effort to relieve publishers of this responsibility.
