DEVELOPMENT OF NATIVE ADVERTISING FORMATS FOR MEDIA: TECHNICAL IMPLEMENTATION AND IMPACT ON MONETIZATION METRICS

ABSTRACT

This article examines the architecture of media platforms and applied methods for implementing native advertising formats without disrupting user perception. It analyzes integration techniques via CMS, API, and visual editors that enable flexibility, adaptability, and adherence to editorial control. The use of analytics tools and event trackers is studied to assess advertising effectiveness, including view depth, user interaction, and click rates. The article demonstrates how collaboration between developers and editorial teams contributes to a scalable monetization system with high audience engagement. Emphasis is placed on the importance of a cohesive architecture that unifies frontend, backend, and analytics components into a single technological ecosystem.

АННОТАЦИЯ

В статье рассматривается архитектура медиаплатформ и прикладные методы, обеспечивающие внедрение нативных рекламных форматов без нарушения пользовательского восприятия. Анализируются способы программной интеграции через CMS, API и визуальные редакторы, обеспечивающие гибкость, адаптивность и соблюдение редакционного контроля. Изучается использование аналитических инструментов и событийных трекеров для оценки эффективности рекламы: глубины просмотра, взаимодействия и кликов. Показано, как взаимодействие между разработчиками и редакцией способствует созданию масштабируемой системы монетизации с высокой вовлеченностью аудитории. Подчеркивается значение целостной архитектуры, объединяющей frontend, backend и аналитические компоненты в единую технологическую экосистему.

Keywords: native advertising, platform architecture, UGC, interaction analytics, CMS, API, monetization.

Ключевые слова: нативная реклама, архитектура платформы, UGC, аналитика взаимодействия, CMS, API, монетизация.

Introduction

In the midst of increased competition in the world of digital media and declining effectiveness of traditional banner ads, native ad formats are gaining a lot of momentum. They are integrated elements that behave and appear similar to editorial content, hence improving interaction on the part of users and reducing banner blindness. With such solutions now increasingly sought after by advertisers, media platforms are compelled to update their system architecture to cater to these new forms of formats without affecting technical stability and user experience.

The development and implementation of native advertising require very harmonious interaction among developers, designers, and editorial personnel. It is even more relevant in the context of user-generated content (UGC) websites, where engagement of users, moderation policies, and compliance with law and regulations are to be taken into consideration. The technical integration is typically executed at the CMS-based components level, at API level, at the analytics tracker configuration level, and maintaining the visual balance between advertisement and editorial content.

The aim of this article is to investigate architectural and functional solutions for integration of native advertising modules into media platforms, state the essence of their technical implementation – user interaction tracking – and examine how native advertising forms affect monetization performance and user retention.

Main part. Media platform architecture: prerequisites for native advertising formats

The integration of native advertising formats into the architecture of media platforms is not feasible without a thorough analysis of their structural and systemic characteristics. One of the most critical factors is the organizational and technical specificity of the UGC model, in which content is created by users rather than exclusively by editorial teams. This model ensures a high volume of content generation and enhances audience engagement; however, it simultaneously introduces constraints regarding the placement and interaction of advertising modules.

According to a study by WPP Media, by 2025, purely digital advertising will account for 73,2% of global advertising revenue. Furthermore, UGC is progressively displacing professionally produced media: more than half of all content-based advertising revenue is expected to be generated through UGC platforms by 2025 (fig. 1).

Figure 1. Dynamics of UGC revenues in 2024-2030 [1]

Within UGC-dependent media sites, editorial impartiality and user satisfaction are of paramount importance. Ad formats embedded among user content must be marked in some fashion in accordance with applicable law or be visually segregated from the remainder of the site without degrading overall appearance. To prevent compromising seen integrity and simplify moderation, interactive features such as comments, likes, and dislikes are often disabled for ad placements. Also, sites hosting dynamic UGC must deal with the scalability challenge of moderation. Therefore, modular architecture must provide for centralized control of advertisement component display and validation regardless of the author of the context content.

The technology base of UGC-centered platforms makes extremely high requirements for scalability, fault tolerance, and flexibility. With such a volume of UGC and sporadic peak loads on public API, the platform has to provide guaranteed performance and allow programmatic integration of supporting modules – such as native ads – without affecting response times. This necessitates clear separation of architectural layers, horizontal scalability, and low coupling between functional components.

At the data level, relational stores like PostgreSQL are extended with vector embeddings and metadata indexing to enable fast filtering of content, and performance is maintained using multi-level caching (e.g., in-memory storage, CDNs). The platform center – referred to as the «Osnova» – provides services such as routing, content aggregation, and modular communication, and is built upon Domain-Driven Design and dependency inversion to enable low coupling and high extensibility. This makes it possible for new modules (e.g., targeting engines) to be added without modifying core interfaces. In practice, such as on DTF.ru and VC.ru, this architecture supports hotness-based ranking and dynamic ad delivery. Sustainable native ad deployment is possible only within such modular, scalable systems that ensure centralized control and preserve user experience.

Mechanisms for embedding native advertising blocks into content

The integration of native advertising formats into the architecture of a media platform is achieved through several complementary technical approaches [2]. The primary objective is to ensure that advertising articles are seamlessly woven within the content environment while maintaining control, interactivity, and compliance with UX standards (fig. 2).

Figure 2. Tools for embedding native advertising blocks into content

The first and most versatile toolset includes CMS platforms and visual content builders, which allow editorial teams to create highly customized native advertising projects. These editors offer flexibility in visual design, integration of multimedia content, and insertion of branded components with full adaptability across platforms and consumption scenarios (table 1).

Table 1.

Technical capabilities of CMS/builder for native advertising

According to research, as of 2025, 68.7% of all websites are powered by content management systems (CMS), underscoring their central role in the digital content ecosystem. WordPress remains the leading CMS, accounting for approximately 40% of the market share [3].

For example, the verstka.io system implements modular content assembly, where each article is treated as a coordinated set of standalone components. This approach ensures a unified visual style consistent with the platform’s design system, while also allowing localized customization of parameters such as background, interactivity, and animation – within preapproved templates. Native ad articles can be automatically inserted into the feed based on predefined conditions such as metadata, content semantics, text length, or position in the feed.

Another effective mechanism is API integration, which allows programmatic control over the insertion of advertising blocks based on contextual data. The system retrieves a list of relevant native modules via REST or GraphQL interfaces, using metadata from the article, user segments, or active campaigns. Each native ad unit is represented as a JSON object containing rendering parameters, display logic (e.g., «show only on mobile devices»), and tracking tags. This enables centralized advertising logic management without duplicating data inside the CMS (table 2).

Table 2.

Functional capabilities of native advertising API integration

Such a structured representation allows advertising modules to be rendered dynamically based on context-specific rules while remaining decoupled from the core content pipeline. By externalizing rendering logic and display conditions, media platforms can ensure consistency, reduce editorial overhead, and maintain centralized control over ad delivery across different user segments and devices.

On the client side, support for interactivity and visual effects is implemented to enhance user engagement [4]. Common approaches include scroll-based animations, parallax, lazy loading of advertising blocks, and responses to user actions such as on-hover logic and click triggers (table 3).

Table 3.

Client-side mechanisms for native advertising interactivity

All this is achievable through modern JavaScript frameworks and browser API such as Intersection Observer, which not only provide optimized performance but also enable precise tracking of users' interactions with the native advertising article. For example, object may trigger animations or start view-time measurement only when it is visible in the viewport region.

To use native formats effectively, thus, requires sweeping, multifaceted effort – ranging from editorial interfaces and API-level integration to front-end interactivity. This design accommodates flexibility, scalability, and high levels of control while ensuring a smooth and consistent user experience.

User interaction management

The integration of native ad formats into media platforms is not merely a technical deployment but also a control of user interaction in accurate specifics. The most critical is the retention of a unified user experience (UX), maintaining editorial and visual continuity, as well as compliance with legal and transparency requirements.

Native advertising blocks typically disable UGC interaction features such as likes, comments, and dislikes to prevent public judgment or negative engagement, which could distort brand perception. This is implemented by suppressing UI elements when the block is marked as promotional via CMS metadata or API. On socially active platforms, this is especially important. To ensure UX consistency, ad articles must align with platform design standards – typography, spacing, grid, and animation – while also complying with legal requirements for disclosure. Labels like «Sponsored» must be embedded at the template level to avoid mislabeling and maintain user trust.

One may use animation and aggressive call-to-action, and another may use static imagery and soft branding. Comparative analysis of the engagement metrics – like on-screen time, CTR, or scroll depth – decide the best balance between subtlety and visibility. A/B testing is particularly valuable in volume campaigns where UX hypotheses need to be validated against user actual behavior.

Briefly, user interaction management is a complex process involving technical filtering, visual consistency, legality, and iterative UX testing. This approach enables media platforms to use native advertising formats without violating the user experience but meeting the demands of regulators, designers, editors, and audiences.

Event tracking and analytics in native advertising projects

The effectiveness of native advertising formats depends directly on the ability to accurately measure user engagement and interaction parameters with the advertising article. Unlike traditional banners, native modules do not always involve a direct click – key metrics instead include scroll depth, time spent in the viewport, cursor hover behavior, and interaction frequency with embedded elements.

Accurate tracking of these events requires coordinated configuration of frontend triggers, backend logging logic, and robust data storage and aggregation systems (table 4).

Table 4.

Core types of user interaction events in native advertising projects [5, 6]

Third-party analytics tools are widely used for collecting these events, including platforms such as Google *Analytics (GA4), Yandex.Metrica, and custom trackers based on dataLayer events and client-side handlers. According to industry reports, Google *Analytics is currently implemented on over 44 million websites. As of January 2025, approximately 23% of GA4-enabled sites are based in the United States, representing a substantial portion of the global market. Google *Analytics continues to hold the largest share in the web analytics domain (fig. 3).

Figure 3. Popular web analytics tools [7]

According to Yandex, 95% of websites in Russia use Yandex.Metrica, and globally, the platform is implemented on over 9 million websites [8]. This functionality facilitates low-level analytics, source-of-traffic attribution, market-level sales dashboards, ad-optimization, and detailed user behavior inspection – culminating in specific user actions. In more intricate interactivity contexts or where more detailed event-level analysis is needed, however, this capability is instead supplemented or replaced by specialized infrastructural capabilities.

Event brokers are used in advanced systems to push frontend data to centralized storage (e.g., PostgreSQL, ClickHouse) via message queues like Kafka or RabbitMQ to enable scalable and fault-tolerant event stream processing. By partitioning events by type and time, platforms can roll up data across user cohorts, ad blocks, and pages to enable both performance analysis and more detailed behavioral analysis – e.g., exit points, funnels, and repeat visits – and also enable automated ad delivery optimization based on real-time metrics.

Thus, event-driven analytics becomes a fundamental component of the native advertising architecture – covering both data collection and strategic decision-making. A tightly integrated system that links frontend tracking, messaging infrastructure, data storage, and BI tools forms a closed feedback loop for optimizing ad effectiveness within a unified technical platform.

Assessing the impact of native advertising formats on engagement and monetization metrics

Native advertising in media platforms is successful not only based on the effectiveness of how it blends visually but also based on its measurable effect on user engagement and monetization outcomes. Compared to the regular banner units, native ad blocks have always registered higher interaction rates as they are relevant in context, supported by editorial standards, and visually maintained against surrounding content.

On the analysis level, primary and secondary interaction measures are used for performance evaluation: CTR, dwell time, interactive elements completion, and target action conversion (outbound clicks or micro-conversions). The metrics can be tracked either through visual editors for embedded analytics tags – such as verstka.io, which provides event tracking by component levels – or through backend event-handling logic written by engineers. In the second case, developers are able to construct customized `dataLayer` events for specific campaign goals, e.g., A/B targeting based on traffic source or previous user behavior.

Native-style ad insertion is a business based on close collaboration of editorial and technical staff. The editor is responsible for ensuring ad articles are thematically and visually appropriate to the media site, remain clean and legible, and are legally compliant. Developers ensure proper rendering and behavior in all contexts – ranging from responsive layout management to event tracking and visibility logic. For instance, a given article may behave differently based on scroll depth, user segment, or screen resolution and require a layered architecture with both frontend and backend control.

To enforce editorial control at scale, media platforms deploy centralized systems for rendering and validation – either through CMS-integrated rules or backend-driven business logic. These include automated formatting checks, mandatory ad labeling, deactivation of UGC interactions, and content restrictions for sensitive topics (e.g., news about disasters or political content). Developers typically implement such constraints through configuration files, JSON-based rule sets, or metadata.

Generally, native advertising is typically more cost-effective to produce and often results in a lower customer acquisition cost. This pairing of affordability and efficiency tends to yield a greater return on investment (ROI), making native ad a wisely intelligent choice for marketers. According to AppSamurai, UGC-driven campaigns have click-through rates (CTR) as much as four times greater and cost-per-click (CPC) as much as 50% less. Furthermore, the pairing of UGC with professionally produced content is capable of driving engagement up to 28% greater. UGC also has high potential for virality, particularly beneficial for interacting and reaching new users.

Thus, the impact of native formats on monetization is experienced not only as quantitative gain – i.e., increased clicking or depth of sessions – but also in control for the platform over where, when, and how the ad content appears. The combination of visual editing features with programmatic logic enables a hybrid workflow wherein creative liberty is balanced against structural control and fine-grained analytics. This convergence is essential in an environment where advertisers need transparency, compliance, and performance accountability.

Conclusion

Media native ad formats are an effective solution to digital media monetization without degrading the user experience. Their take-up depends on a combination of adaptive technical infrastructure, editorial oversight, and high-quality analytics infrastructure. Accuracy targeting and event tracking functionality are essential, enabling ad modules to respond dynamically to content environment and user behavior in real time. This approach not only increases user engagement but also establishes an open and managed system of interaction among the platform, advertiser, and final user.

References:

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