Many app publishers attempt to maintain stability in their app by not making any changes, despite the constantly evolving mobile ads business.  This approach can be detrimental in the long run by causing you to miss out on growth opportunities. Continuously testing new approaches in your app is an essential part of an effective monetization strategy, so we’d like to go over a few examples of tests you can implement now to get you started.

What are some things I can test?

With AdMob, you can test any feature of your app that can be defined with a variable. Here are some experiments you can start with:

Ads alongside in-app purchases

If you currently monetize your app exclusively through in-app purchases (IAPs), testing ads alongside IAPs is a low risk approach that allows you to understand the impact of including another monetization model.  For example, game publisher Four Thirty Threeused to rely exclusively on in-app purchases (IAP) for their revenue.  They used smart segmentation to divide their users into likely purchasers and likely non-purchasers.  This allowed them to remove any risk of harming their IAP revenue by ensuring that ads were only shown to users who did not spend within their app anyway.  After serving rewarded ads to non-paying users, their retention, session duration, and revenue increased.

New features

Pricing

A/B testing can be an invaluable tool to help determine the best price point for a subscription or in-app purchase. Le Figaro, France’s oldest and largest daily newspaper, was looking to increase paying customers and retain paid subscribers. They used Firebase to test different subscription price points, and even found that the largest increase in paid subscriptions was driven after embedding real time interactive infographics into their mobile and web articles.

How can I test it?

If you haven’t yet linked AdMob to Firebase and wish to A/B test, we recommend you do so. Integrating Firebase into your AdMob account is simple, and lets you test small changes to your apps without having to push updates. After setting up your account, endless experiments become available to you with just a few clicks. If you’d like a quick summary of what Firebase can do for your AdMob account, check out this YouTube video.

Although ads are often a cornerstone of successful app businesses, some developers have misconceptions that hold them back from trying ads in their app. We thought it would be helpful to address some of the more common misconceptions we’ve heard to help app publishers uncover opportunities to increase their revenue.

1) Ads interrupt the app experience of my users

One common misconception is that ads will negatively impact the app experience, when in reality most ad formats today are designed to either integrate seamlessly with your app, add to the user experience, or both.

For example, rewarded ads can give people a bonus in exchange for watching an advertisement and are a great way to make premium content available to non-paying users.

Interstitial ads are shown at natural breakpoints in your app, such as between levels or at loading screens, and allow you to engage users when they would otherwise be looking at a “waiting” screen.

Finally, native ads can be designed to match the look and feel of your app to integrate seamlessly with your app’s content, causing virtually no disruption to the user experience while earning you revenue.

2) I can't control what ads show up in my app

App publishers are justifiably concerned about what ads show up in their app, so we’ve taken steps to ensure that your app will only serve ads that meet the guidelines you’ve set. Our ad controls allow you to set a maximum content rating level orblock ads by category, ad type, URL, and more.  Both of these controls can be applied to a single app or to your whole AdMob account.  

For example, applying a maximum rating of G to your account ensures that only G-rated ads are served across all of your apps.  However, you can simultaneously set a maximum rating of T for a specific app to allow it to include PG and T rated ads as well.  For even more control, our Ad Review Center allows you to review individual ads on a creative-by-creative basis to decide whether you want to continue serving them. We’ve designed these features to ensure that you only serve ads you feel are appropriate for your users.

3) Ads will drive away my paying app users

Some publishers avoid including ads in their app because they don’t want to interrupt the experience of their paying users.  To address this, we offer a tool called smart segmentation that allows you to only show ads to non-paying users while preserving the ad-free experience for paying users.

Smart segmentation has worked well for several publishers including BlackLight Studio Games, who wanted to expand monetization in their game Ludo SuperStar without hurting paid user experience, retention, and in-app purchase (IAP) revenue.  After implementing smart segmentation, they experienced a 23% increase in game revenue with no changes to user retention or average revenue per user (ARPU).

We hope this helps clear up some common misconceptions around how ads can fit into your mobile app. Even if your app is paid or offers in-app purchases, consider testing ads in your app to maximize your revenue and grow your mobile app business.  For a more detailed breakdown of app business models, download our free No-Nonsense Guide to App Monetization. And if you’re ready to start earning money with ads, sign up for an AdMob account today.

In today’s mobile-first world, people use a wide range of device types. As a result, app publishers who use banner ads must now serve them across a greater variety of screen sizes and layouts.  While some responsive banner ad formats exist, they often produce ads that are too small and not sufficiently tailored to the height and aspect ratio of each device.

To address this, we’ve created a new banner type called adaptive anchor banners. These ads dynamically adjust banner sizes to deliver a creative that is ideally sized across your user’s devices without the need for any custom code.

The adaptive anchor banner advantage

Adaptive anchor banners are designed to be a drop-in replacement for the industry standard 320x50 banner size and the smart banner format.  Standard sized banners return the same sized creative across every screen, which often results in ads that appear too small or too large. Smart banners only support fixed heights, so they often return creative that appears too small on high-res devices. 

Unlike other banner APIs on the market, adaptive anchor banners consider the device in use, the ad width you’re comfortable using, and the aspect ratios and performance of all available demand.  Adaptive anchor banners return creatives with the best height and aspect ratio for each device, with hard limits to prevent the wrong sizes from being served.

Your banners will look better than ever in your app, and writing custom code to handle different devices will be a task of the past. Using this format in place of standard and/or smart banners can help you maximize revenue while also making managing your ads less complex and more efficient.

Getting started with adaptive anchor banners

Adaptive anchor banners are a great option for AdMob publishers who want the simplest solution to getting the best banner ad returned across any device.  This format is still in beta on Google Ad Manager, so publishers who want to try it out on that platform should reach out to their account managers or contact our support team.

Adaptive anchor banners are currently only available for anchored placements—banners locked to the top or bottom of the screen. However, AdMob is actively developing another adaptive algorithm for in-line banners placed in scroll views or within content.

To get started with adaptive anchor banners for AdMob, check out our implementation guides (iOS, Android). We walk you through when it’s appropriate to use adaptive banners, implementation notes, and code examples.

We recommend testing adaptive banners against some of your existing banner ads to understand how they can help you maximize fill rates, engagement, and revenue.

At AdMob, we’re focused on helping publishers make smarter decisions to grow their mobile app earnings and deliver the best experience to their users. Clear, comprehensive reporting is a big part of this, and we’ve recently released some updates to our reporting so that you can gain more actionable insights about your app users. 

More insights about how people use your app

We’ve enhanced our AdMob SDK to begin providing insights into how your users are interacting with your app and engaging with your rewarded ads.  To enable these new features, you need to do two things:

1. Update your SDK to the latest version (Android SDK 18.1.0 or later, iOS SDK 7.44 or later)
   

2. Log into AdMob and take a few simple steps to enable user metrics  (Help Center Article)

Once you’ve done both, available new features will include:

User engagement card

When you log into your AdMob account, we’ll now present you with important basic user engagement metrics on your App Overview dashboard.  This report helps you keep an eye on your app’s most important top-line user numbers so you always know how your apps are performing.

Holistic revenue report including in-app purchases

We’ve updated our revenue reporting to look beyond AdMob earnings to also include in-app purchases and subscriptions. This will minimize time spent going back and forth between interfaces so you can spend more time working on your app. IAP reporting is currently only offered on iOS, but will be coming to Android soon.

Rewarded ads report

You’ll now have access to the rewarded ads report, helping you understand how users are interacting with rewarded ads.  This report captures activity from the entire AdMob platform, including AdMob, Open Bidding, and 3rd-party inventory. We’re also working to provide additional reporting around each of your ad formats so you can make the most informed decision with your app business.

Expanded functionality and ease of use

In addition to adding new reports, we’ve also launched several new features that make it easier for you to access, analyze and understand your data: 

AdMob API

Traditionally, developers have had to use the AdSense API to access AdMob stats.  This was a suboptimal solution, as AdSense uses different ad metric definitions than AdMob, resulting in inconsistent reporting.  To address this, we’re introducing a brand new AdMob API to help you retrieve your publisher reports programmatically. Metrics in the AdMob API will be consistent with those in the AdMob front-end interface and will be more accurate than those in the AdSense API.  This API is currently in beta, so reach out to your account manager or a mobile specialist if you’re interested in trying it out.

Easy comparison reporting

When looking at changes to a single AdMob metric, such as revenue, we know that context is key. So we’ve added the ability for you to compare two metrics within the same chart (see upper right in image below) so that you can more easily correlate trends within your data.

You can also now break out metrics, such as estimated earnings, by dimensions like app, ad unit, format, and country (see upper left in image below).  Our improved graph interactivity allows you to add or remove dimensions by simply clicking on the corresponding circle in the key, as shown below on the upper left.

Reporting is an integral part of optimizing any app ads business, and we’re continuously taking steps to make actionable insights easier to discover for publishers.  We hope these new features will help publishers better understand their users and ad performance so they can focus on driving more revenue and delighting their users.

Video ads are one of the most effective ad formats to use in your app. Increasingly, people expect to see ads that are relevant to them and that don’t interrupt their app experience—and video ads deliver on both counts. They’re a powerful canvas that you can use to engage users, for you and your advertisers. With a variety of formats, such as rewarded, interstitial, or native video, you can integrate video ads into your app to provide an enhanced experience. 

But using video ads goes beyond selecting them as an option in Google AdMob. To make sure users have the best experience with video ads, you need to optimize your app to play them. If the video doesn’t play correctly, users often blame the app, not the ad. Playback needs to start promptly and reliably, and continue without interruption. But serving an ad in a mobile app is not always easy—a number of factors can degrade the experience. The network connection might be poor, or the phone itself might be busy with other things.

Video ads use more memory, network, and device resources than other types of ads. The key to optimal video quality is to use these resources as efficiently and as intelligently as you can. And when your video quality is better, your ads will perform better too, and you may find that your app becomes more stable overall.

Load ads well in advance to permit buffering

The moment you load a video ad, behind the scenes the ad starts buffering (essentially pre-loading) the video. In this instance, the network is the bottleneck. For example, if the phone is connected to WiFi or 4G, buffering should happen fast. But if the user is on a slower network, it can degrade or interrupt playback. The more time you allow for the ad to fill its buffer, the more reliable playback will be.

Seconds matter. Load your ad at least 15 seconds in advance of showing it. Even a few seconds in advance will prevent some users from seeing a blank ad.

Free unused ads

If you load an ad that you won't need, like a rewarded ad where the user declined the reward, then be sure to release it right away. This frees up memory and video decoders, which will help the phone run faster and reduce the possibility of interruption on your app. On Android, we recommend you null your reference to the ad, and if you're using native ads, call UnifiedNativeAd.destroy() on the main thread. On iOS, set your reference to nil.

Avoid loading multiple concurrent ads

Every phone has a limit to the number of videos it can hold in a prepared state. The Google Mobile Ads SDK doesn't know which video ad will be shown next, so it keeps them all prepared. Lots of phones can't hold more than one prepared video at a time. So whether your app is used in developing or developed markets, it’s very important to always free up memory as soon as possible.

Load only the ads that you need to give them the best chance at successful playback. For example, if you show multiple video ads, like native video ads in a news feed, then be sure to recycle ads that have scrolled offscreen so video players don't just pile up in memory. This should also lead to better overall app performance.

Don’t show an ad before receiving a notification that it has loaded

The Google Mobile Ads SDK uses notifications to inform the app when a video is prepared to play. On Android, it is possible to show an ad before this notification--a legacy from the days of static content ads--but it's not a good idea to do that. Video performance will be poor and users may think something is wrong not just with playback, but with the app itself.

On Android, this notification arrives through AdListener.onAdLoaded().

Be extra cautious combining video ads with video content

The recommended approach of not loading multiple concurrent video ads applies equally to content video and ad video. If your app plays video outside of ads, then freeing content video resources before video ads are shown will help reliability, too.

As developers, you put a huge amount of time and energy into creating an engaging app. And a great app experience should provide a great ad experience. We hope these tips help you make the most out of video ads as part of your monetization strategy.