Placements

A placement is where a Specify ad actually appears in your app. Choosing a placement well is one of the highest-leverage decisions a publisher makes — it affects user experience, conversion rate (which feeds directly into your revenue share tier), and how your brand is perceived.

This page is more about the logic of good placements than the exact pixel dimensions. For the technical details, see the SDK and API docs.

Banners: the easy starting point

The simplest and often fastest path to an initial integration is a banner-style placement.

Banners are well-understood, easy to drop into existing layouts, and fit cleanly into most app designs. If you’re getting Specify live for the first time, a banner is almost always the right call — ship it, start earning, and iterate from there.

Currently supported image formats

The Specify SDK supports three image formats out of the box:

These cover most conventional banner placements across desktop and mobile layouts.

Native placements: where the real upside is

Whenever possible, we love exploring more native placements — ads that feel like a natural part of your app rather than an ad slot bolted on.

Native placements tend to outperform banners significantly, for obvious reasons:

• Less likely to be ignored — they don’t trigger the banner blindness users have spent 20 years developing
• Less likely to annoy — they feel contextual, not imposed
• Higher conversion rates — which means higher revenue share tiers for you

Examples of native placements that have worked well for publishers:

• Inline recommendations within a list of tokens, pools, or protocols a user is browsing
• “Related” cards surfaced after a user completes an action (a swap, a deposit, a mint)
• Empty-state suggestions — when a user has no activity in a section yet, an ad for a relevant product feels like a genuine recommendation
• Discovery feeds where new protocols and products are explicitly what the user came to see

The common thread: the ad arrives at a moment where the user wants something, and it tries to be what they want.

Designing a custom placement

If you have an idea for a placement that doesn’t fit an existing format, we want to hear it.

We’ll work with you to design and build it — this is genuinely one of the more interesting parts of the job, and native formats shaped around your specific app are usually where publishers see the best performance.

A few things to keep in mind:

• New image formats require a feasibility study. Every format we add increases the creative requirements on advertisers. Before adding a new one we look at whether advertisers can realistically produce assets for it, and whether the placement will see enough volume to justify asking them to
• Native doesn’t always mean new image format. Many native placements can be built with the existing image formats plus creative layout on your side. That’s often the faster path
• We’re partners on this, not gatekeepers. If a placement idea is good, we’ll find a way to make it work

What Specify actually returns

Worth knowing when you’re designing placements: the Specify SDK returns more than just an image.

Every ad response includes text content, brand information, call-to-action metadata, and more — which means your placement can be as simple or as rich as your UI supports. A native inline card, for example, might use the image, headline, and CTA together rather than just dropping in a banner.

See the SDK docs and API reference for the full schema of what’s returned and how to use it.