Tag Archives: AdMob

Rounding up our judges panel for the AdMob Student App Challenge

Meet our final two judges, Craig Warner and Jon Potter. Craig brings a wealth of experience from a Google perspective, while Jon provides insights from the Application Developers Alliance. Read below for their perspective on app development: their suggestions will be a major part of the judging criteria for the AdMob Student App Challenge.


Craig Warner
Head of Publishers, Domains and Distribution, Google

What is your background and experience working with apps?
Help support the leading global app creators to make money through ads and in-app purchase.

What is the most important thing you look for when reviewing an app?
Simplicity.

What tip(s) would you give to a new app developer building their first app?
Ask yourself if you would actually use the app for more than a day.

What are some golden rules of app design?
Transparency about how you collect and use user data.  Performance and stability.

Anything else you want student developers to know?
Apps are not new, it was the way users interacted with computers before the web. The primary difference is price (much lower) and number of potential users (much greater). The fundamental characteristics of a great app don't change much over time.


Jon Potter
Co-founder, Application Developers Alliance

What is your background and experience working with apps?
My professional focus has been educating governments and public officials about apps and the app economy - promoting and protecting apps that disrupt entrenched industries (which often seek government protection) and also apps that independently draw government and legal attention (e.g., due to privacy, health care or other regulatory concerns). In 2012 I founded the App Developers Alliance, where I was President until late 2015.

What is the most important thing you look for when reviewing an app?
I review apps as a consumer (clear presentation, clean look, improve my life) and as an investor (solve a problem, improve many lives, disrupt large industries).

What tip(s) would you give to a new app developer building their first app?
Identify clear goals and deliverables. Stay focused.

What are some golden rules of app design?
Simplicity and clarity. Do one thing very well. Deliver value while I am disconnected (i.e., on an airplane).

Anything else you want student developers to know?
Great ideas require great teams to become great experiences and great businesses. There are so many magnificent opportunities - in consumer apps, industrial apps, socially beneficial apps. Play to win but don't forget to enjoy the ride.

As a reminder, there are only six weeks left before the final project submission date of June 28, 2016. In the coming weeks, we will shift our focus from app development and design to project completion, with reminders on timeframes and some best practices for your business report. If you’d like to learn more about the judging process please visit our AdMob Challenge judges page for more details. Lastly, remember to continue to follow us on AdMob G+ and Twitter, and keep an eye on #AdMobSAC16 too, for regular updates on the challenge.

Posted by Jeff Miner
AdMob Student App Challenge Team

Source: Inside AdMob


Mobile Ads Garage #3: Banner ad best practices

Ever wondered about the best ways to monetize with banner ads while maintaining a great user experience? If so, the Mobile Ads Garage is here to help. In the third episode, Andrew and Gary the Graphics Guy cover how to integrate banner ads into a mobile app's UX, with a little help from Aunt Betty, hairless cats, and discount moose repellent. You'll see detailed breakdowns of things to avoid, plus reliable best practices that you can take back to your own apps. As always, links to guides, samples, and other resources are included.


If you like the video, save the Mobile Ads Garage playlist to your YouTube Playlist collection and you'll never miss an episode.

We’d love to hear which AdMob features you’d like to learn more about. The comment sections for the videos are open, and you're welcome to toss out ideas for new episodes and examples you'd like to see. If you have a technical question relating to something discussed in one of the episodes, you can bring it to our support forum.

 - , Mobile Ads Developer Relations

Mobile Ads Garage: Episode 3 – Banner Best Practices

Ever wondered about the best ways to monetize with banner ads while maintaining a great user experience? If so, the Mobile Ads Garage is here to help.

In the third episode, Andrew and Gary the Graphics Guy cover how to integrate banner ads into a mobile app's UX, with a little help from Aunt Betty, hairless cats, and discount moose repellent. You'll see detailed breakdowns of things to avoid, plus reliable best practices that you can take back to your own apps. As always, links to guides, samples, and other resources are included.



If you like the video, save the Mobile Ads Garage playlist to your YouTube Playlist collection and you'll never miss an episode.
We’d love to hear which AdMob features you’d like to learn more about. The comment sections for the videos are open, and you're welcome to toss out ideas for new episodes and examples you'd like to see. If you have a technical question relating to something discussed in one of the episodes, you can bring it to our support forum.
 - , Mobile Ads Developer Relations

Source: Inside AdMob


App Monetization Insights: What’s an Ad Network and How Can It Help My App Business?

For this week’s “App Monetization Insights” post, we’d like to share an excerpt from AdMob’s newest eBook, The No-nonsense Guide to In-app Ads (download it here). This guide is designed to provide a practical introduction to in-app advertising for developers exploring ads for the first time. The excerpt we’re sharing today covers how an ad network works and how it can help your app business. Enjoy!

Ad networks do the hard work of bringing together the parties that participate in online advertising, making it simpler for everyone involved to succeed. They build relationships with businesses looking to advertise and apps looking to make money by selling ads. Through an ad network, advertisers can get access to lots of different inventory in apps at scale. And, they also help app developers find advertisers quickly. You can spend less time marketing your advertising space and more time focused on creating the best app for your users.

Take a look at this simplified illustration showing how an ad network works:


And voila! Your app generated revenue from ads. All of this happens very quickly, usually in less than a second.

It’s important to remember that not all ad networks are the same. Some networks focus on price and getting an ad in front of as many people as possible. Others care more about the quality of their advertisers. Some include extra features to help you with other parts of your business. Others keep their SDK as lightweight and easy to implement as possible. There are a lot of options and a lot of factors to consider.

How do you choose the right ad network for your app? In the next chapter, we’ll explore this question in depth.

If you enjoyed this chapter, be sure to download the entire guide here. For more tips on app monetization, be sure to stay connected on all things AdMob by following our Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ pages.

Posted by Joe Salisbury, Product Specialist, AdMob

Source: Inside AdMob


Introducing 2 more of our AdMob Student App Challenge judges

After introducing Chris Akhavanr and Purnima Kochikar in the last blog post, we would like to introduce our next two judges for the AdMob Student App Challenge: Robert Unsworth and Gregory Block. They are part of a six-person judge panel that will judge your app, and decide on the Grand Prize winner. As a reminder, the Grand Prize winner will score a week-long trip to San Francisco, including a visit to Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, as well as have their app featured on the Google Play store. To help you better prepare, we’d like to share some of the insights we gained from getting to know them, as well as what, in their view, makes a great app!



Robert Unsworth
VP Americas, News Republic

What is your background and experience working with apps?
12 years working in gaming, social and media apps across the globe.

What is the most important thing you look for when reviewing an app?
Usability and efficiency - within 60 seconds do I understand what it's for and how I need to use it in order for it to provide me with a service I need.

What tip(s) would you give to a new app developer building their first app?
Test it on real people and iterate frequently and quickly. Don't go just by the metrics but integrate qualitative feedback as well.

Anything else you want student developers to know?
There are two: Keep it simple and keep it simple.


Gregory Block
Director of Engineering, Google

What is your background and experience working with apps?
I've been responsible for the development and build of several apps, both inside and outside of Google, on both Chrome and in Android.

What is the most important thing you look for when reviewing an app?
Attention to detail of the user experience, and how well the app serves the core use case it's trying to address.  Users sweat the small stuff - developers should too.  Polish matters - it's not just about looking pretty, it's about feeling solid, responsive, and zippy.

What tip(s) would you give to a new app developer building their first app?
Sketch broadly, at first.  Build end-to-end use cases, and use them.  Iterate.  Don't go deep on a single screen and end up with unpolished areas, time-box yourself on things, and keep honest track of what's left to do. Don't end up on a death march in your last week of development because you spent time today doing things that weren't absolutely necessary. Don't cut the wrong corner at the wrong time.

And write tests. Because even if you think you're good enough to not need them, you'll wish you had by the time it's all over.

Anything else you want student developers to know?
Love your app. If there's something you don't love, your users probably won't love it either. Minimalism is more forgivable than lack of polish in the eyes of your users, but ultimately, you're the most important user to satisfy; be honest with and true to yourself.

If you’d like to learn more about the judging process please visit our AdMob Student App Challenge judges page for more details. Lastly, remember to continue to follow us on AdMob G+ and Twitter, and keep an eye on #AdMobSAC16 too, for regular updates on the challenge.

Posted by Jeff Miner, AdMob Student App Challenge Team

Source: Inside AdMob


Preventing accidental clicks for a better mobile ads experience

We’ve all been there. You’re trying to send an article from your phone to a friend, or you’re playing a mobile game while waiting in line for a movie, when you accidentally touch an ad on your screen. You weren’t interested in the ad -- heck, you didn’t even have time to see what it was for -- but now you’re hitting the back button to get back to what you were doing. Not only do accidental clicks like these annoy users, but left unaddressed, they can drive down the value of ads.

Over the last four years, we’ve introduced a series of protections across mobile web and mobile apps to prevent accidental clicks like these on ads. Today we are continuing this commitment to protecting users and advertisers by extending accidental click protections to native ad formats. Native ads were developed to help publishers and developers implement ads that complement the look and feel of their content.

Since our teams started instituting various click protections, we’ve learned quite a bit along the way. Here are two insights among many that guide our ongoing work.

Fast clicks are not real clicks
A professional baseball player has about 680ms1 to react and swing at a baseball thrown at 90mph. That’s fast, even for a professional who’s paying close attention to hitting the ball. We think it’s virtually impossible for someone to read, understand, and take action on an ad in that amount of time.

Figure 1: A click is ignored when a user accidentally fast clicks on an interstitial ad

Not surprisingly, we found super-fast clicks on ads to provide little to no value to advertisers. That’s why we ignore fast clicks that we detect to be accidental immediately upon ad load. Rather than our ads causing surprise low quality clicks, users can continue on uninterrupted.

Edge clicks lack value
If you’ve used a mobile device, you know fat-fingers are a reality of touchscreens: the average fingerpad is roughly 50px large when pressing down.2 When we’re swiping, pinching, and poking our screens, it’s easy to accidentally touch the edge of an ad that appears unexpectedly or is placed too close to tappable controls on your screen.

Figure 2: A click is ignored when a user misses adjacent content and accidentally hits the ad

When we compared the performance of clicks from the edge of ads to those coming from the interior region, we found dramatically higher conversion rates and user intentionality on clicks toward the middle of ad units. A few years ago, we started to expand these protections across mobile placements resulting in ad clicks that are more intentional.

The overall benefits of click protections
Fast clicks and edge clicks are just two of the user interaction issues we prevent in order to deliver value to advertisers. By expanding protections like these to native ad formats on mobile, we observe conversion rates increase over 10% on average with minimal impact to long term publisher revenue. This combined with our previous efforts has greatly improved the experience with mobile ads for users and advertisers.

The protections we’ve put in place across mobile web and mobile apps prevent tens of millions of accidental clicks per day, saving users tens of thousands of hours. When we look at the effect for advertisers in mobile apps, we observe double the value per click. We work hard to ensure that the clicks advertisers are charged for are more meaningful, and we hope sharing insight on these protections helps raise awareness and guide the wider advertising ecosystem. Plus, we really love playing games on our phones too, and want to make sure that we’re only taken to an advertiser’s page when we mean to go there.

Posted by Alex Jacobson, Product Manager, Ad Traffic Quality

1: 90ft/132 ft per second = 681ms, 132 ft per second = 90mph
2: http://touchlab.mit.edu/publications/2003_009.pdf

Source: Inside AdMob


Introducing our AdMob Student App Challenge judges

Now that we’re two months away from the deadline of June 28, 2016 to submit your app and business report for the AdMob Student App Challenge, we’d like to introduce our judges via a three-part blog post. They’re a panel of six industry experts who will judge the final round of the judging process and decide the Grand Prize winner.

The Grand Prize winner will score a week-long trip to San Francisco, including a visit to Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, as well as have their app featured on the Google Play store. To help you better prepare, we’d like to share some of the insights we gained from getting to know them as well as what, in their view, makes a great app!

Chris Akhavan
President of Publishing @Glu Mobile, a leading global developer in gaming

What is your background and experience working with apps?

I'm currently the President of Publishing at Glu Mobile (we make mobile games like Kim Kardashian: Hollywood, Racing Rivals, and Cooking Dash), and prior to that I was the SVP of Partnerships at Tapjoy (a mobile ad network I joined in the early days and helped grow from 10 people to 300+ and $120MM+ [revenue?]/year).

What is the most important thing you look for when reviewing an app?

A simple and clean user experience. Great mobile apps immediately delight users within the first 30 seconds and deliver value with ease.

What tip(s) would you would give to a new app developer building their first app?

The biggest mistake I see new developers make is forgetting that they are designing for a very small device. I often see new developers using tiny fonts that are hard to read on a phone, and placing too many intricate buttons in the UI. Look at apps like Instagram and Clash Royale for inspiration on clear and simple mobile design.

Anything else you want student developers to know?

I'm excited to check out your apps!

Purnima Kochikar
Director of Business Development for Google Play, Google

What is your background and experience working with apps?

I lead the team that works with all the apps and games developers on Android/Google Play globally. I was also a software engineer in my past life and wrote apps - but that was a LONG time ago.

What is the most important thing you look for when reviewing an app?

  • Utility (does it have a clear purpose - and that could be fun)
  • Beauty (is it well designed?)
  • Creativity (is it an innovative solution for the problem being tackled?)

What are some golden rules of good app design? 

The rule I like best is the 1-minute value - the user should get the full sense of your app within a minute.  Uber is a great example - within a minute you get all the information you need about finding a ride. To be able to do that Uber has reduced input required from the user by using the sensors on the device - such as GPS.

Anything else you want student developers to know?

Follow your heart - build something to solve a problem or create an fun experience that truly matters to you. The best apps are those that come from a deep-rooted interest in the topic.

Well folks, there you have it! We hope that these tips and advice can help guide you as you continue to build your app! Stay tuned for two more posts about our judges in the coming weeks.

If you’d like to learn more about the judging process please visit our AdMob Challenge judges page for more details. Lastly, remember to continue to follow us on AdMob G+ and Twitter, and keep an eye on #AdMobSAC16 too, for regular updates on the challenge.

Posted by Andres Calzada, AdMob Student App Challenge Team

Source: Inside AdMob


Mobile Ads Garage Episode 2: Implementing AdMob Banner Ads

The Mobile Ads Garage has returned with its second episode. In this video, you'll see screencasts and detailed breakdowns of how to implement banner ads for both iOS and Android. Plus, you'll get links to guides, samples, and other great resources.


If you like the video, save the Mobile Ads Garage playlist to your YouTube Playlist collection and you'll never miss an episode.

We’d love to hear which AdMob features you’d like to learn more about. The comment sections for the videos are open, and you're welcome to toss out ideas for new episodes and examples you'd like to see. If you have a technical question relating to something discussed in one of the episodes, you can bring it to our support forum.

 - , Mobile Ads Developer Relations

The Mobile Ads Garage: Episode 2 – Implementing AdMob Banner Ads

The Mobile Ads Garage has returned with its second episode. In this video, you'll see screencasts and detailed breakdowns of how to implement banner ads for both iOS and Android. Plus, you'll get links to guides, samples, and other great resources.


If you like the video, save the Mobile Ads Garage playlist to your YouTube Playlist collection and you'll never miss an episode.

We’d love to hear which AdMob features you’d like to learn more about. The comment sections for the videos are open, and you're welcome to toss out ideas for new episodes and examples you'd like to see. If you have a technical question relating to something discussed in one of the episodes, you can bring it to our support forum.

For more tips on app monetization, be sure to stay connected on all things AdMob by following our Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ pages.

 - , Mobile Ads Developer Relations

Source: Inside AdMob


[New eBook] Download The No-Nonsense Guide to In-App Ads

Originally Posted on Inside AdMob Blog
Posted by Joe Salisbury, Product Specialist, AdMob
A clear trend is emerging in the world of smartphones – people want free apps. According to a study by Juniper Research, barely 1% of apps are now paid for at the point of download.1

While demand for free apps continues to increase, app developers are answering a very important question, “what’s the best way to publish my app for free while sustainably funding my business?”

In-app ads are a reliable solution that is set to grow 3.2X between 2014-18. 2

Many of the world’s most popular apps rely heavily on in-app advertising to earn income. Apps like PicsArts and Trivia Crack each have hundreds of millions of downloads and use advertising as a revenue source. In-app ads are evolving and there are many options for developers to utilize which provide great experiences for users.

So, how do you get started with ads?

To answer this, we’re launching a new ebook called “The No-nonsense Guide to In-App Ads”, the latest in our No-nonsense series. This guide is designed to provide a comprehensive overview of in-app advertising for those new to the opportunity. We’ll walk you through how digital ads can be included into your app strategy and what’s the best way for you to get started.

In the eBook, you’ll learn:

  • Foundational advertising concepts like eCPM, Fill Rate, Demand, and Inventory.
  • A simple overview of how businesses make money from advertising. 
  • How Pay Per Click advertising works.
  • A basic explanation of ad networks and how they can help you monetize your app.
  • How to choose the right ad network for your app.

Download a free copy here.


For more tips on app monetization, be sure to stay connected on all things AdMob by following our Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ pages.

Posted by Joe Salisbury, Product Specialist, AdMob

1 - Juniper, April 2015 and Juniper website, The App Landscape Today, Feb 2015