Adding SDK-less mediation to your project

We recently announced SDK-less mediation - a new way for DFP and AdMob publishers to use mediation to access additional ad networks without having to integrate and maintain multiple third-party SDKs and adapters. Today, we would like to go into more detail on how you can integrate SDK-less in your project.

With SDK-less mediation, everything is done through a single SDK, the Google Mobile Ads SDK. It is now possible to add additional ad networks server-side without having to update your apps. Also, SDK-less supports all existing mediation features including ad network optimization, live eCPM, and country-specific CPM values, so you won’t lose any of the features that you get with standard mediation.

An SDK-less network looks and feels like any other third-party mediation network in AdMob. It includes an ‘SDK-less’ suffix (see screenshot below) and has its own settings.

Supporting SDK-less Mediation

To support SDK-less ad networks, Android apps require v7.8 or higher of the Google Mobile Ads SDK for both AdMob and DFP. However, devices that have an up-to-date Google Play services already support SDK-less.

For iOS apps, v7.2.1 or higher of the Google Mobile Ads SDK is required for AdMob and v7.6.0 or higher is required for DFP. If a publisher’s app is not updated to the minimum SDK version required to support SDK-less networks, then the mediated request excludes all SDK-less networks.

In many cases, even after you migrate to the latest version of the Google Mobile Ads SDK, there may be apps that still reference older SDKs. To accommodate this, AdMob allows publishers to place both SDK adapters and SDK-less sources in a single mediation chain. Apps that don’t meet the minimum SDK requirements will ignore the SDK-less mediation sources automatically.

Ad Networks Supporting SDK-less Mediation

There are currently four ad networks that support SDK-less mediation for both banner ads and interstitial ads. The AdMob developer site for Android and iOS provides a table that lists all the AdMob mediation networks including the type of mediation and ad formats that they support. Please keep an eye on this table as there will be more ad networks supporting SDK-less in the near future.

If you have any questions regarding SDK-less mediation, feel free to contact us through our forum.

 - , Mobile Ads Developer Relations