Google goes after mobile native advertising with new AdSense formats

Google is plugging the hole that has remained a key weakness in mobile advertising: native ads. On Wednesday, the company announced the launch of native ads for all AdSense publishers.

AdSense native ad formats include in-feed, in-article and matched content. All can be customized to match the look and feel of the publisher’s mobile sites. Publishers can use any or all of these ad categories on their sites.

Matched content is Google’s content recommendation product that launched in 2015 for AdSense publishers to promote their own content. Eligible publishers can now show relevant ads in their Matched content units, which appear at the bottom of articles.

On the advertisers’ end, these units are populated with the responsive ads Google has been pushing heavily.

Facebook’s mobile native ads are now responsible for powering roughly 80 percent of the social network’s ad revenue. Google’s rollout of native ads is also a shot at native ads platform Sharethrough, which has enabled native ads for publisher sties and apps since 2014 across its network.