Twitter’s app install ads go native inside its ad network

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Twitter is sprucing up the look of advertisers’ mobile app install ads within its in-app ad network.

On Thursday, Twitter announced that mobile app advertisers can have their app install ads automatically converted to appear natively within the apps in the Twitter Audience Platform, which the company claims reaches 800 million people across “thousands” of apps.

To syndicate an app install campaign as a native ad across Twitter’s ad network, a mobile app advertiser just needs to check a box labeled “native” when setting up the campaign on the Twitter Audience Platform. From there, Twitter’s technology will take the ad’s individual assets, like its text, images and app-store links, and reassemble them, color-by-numbers style, within a template that will make them appear more like normal content within a mobile app, such as a post in an article feed or a listing in a list of places to check out.

Twitter claimed that, in testing, native app install ads received 56 percent higher click-to-install rates than app install ads that appeared as traditional banner ads and interstitials, which until now were the only ways an app install ad from Twitter could appear in its ad network.

For now, mobile app engagement ads, which are designed to get someone who has already installed an app to use it, cannot be converted into native ads across Twitter’s ad network.

About The Author

Tim Peterson

Tim Peterson, Third Door Media’s Social Media Reporter, has been covering the digital marketing industry since 2011. He has reported for Advertising Age, Adweek and Direct Marketing News. A born-and-raised Angeleno who graduated from New York University, he currently lives in Los Angeles. He has broken stories on Snapchat’s ad plans, Hulu founding CEO Jason Kilar’s attempt to take on YouTube and the assemblage of Amazon’s ad-tech stack; analyzed YouTube’s programming strategy, Facebook’s ad-tech ambitions and ad blocking’s rise; and documented digital video’s biggest annual event VidCon, BuzzFeed’s branded video production process and Snapchat Discover’s ad load six months after launch. He has also developed tools to monitor brands’ early adoption of live-streaming apps, compare Yahoo’s and Google’s search designs and examine the NFL’s YouTube and Facebook video strategies.