Tag Archives: AdMob Mediation

Introducing Open Bidding, a new way to monetize

At AdMob, we’re dedicated to building simple and powerful tools that help developers earn more from their apps. It’s why we’ve steadily increased our investment in monetization solutions such as mediation groups and ad network optimization. But we aren’t stopping there.

Last week, we announced the closed beta of Open Bidding -- a new way for you to grow revenue by maximizing the value you get from your various ad partners. Today, we're sharing more details on how Open Bidding works and why developers and our industry partners are excited about it.


Earn more with real-time pricing

Say you’re selling a house. Would you sell it to the first person in line based on their estimated offer or would you collect all offers at the same time and sell to the highest bidder? You should be doing the same with ads in your app.

Open Bidding allows your ad sources to bid on each impression in real time. Unlike traditional mediation that uses historical data to prioritize networks and call them one at a time, Open Bidding calls all participating networks simultaneously, enabling them to compete equally in a single, unified auction. For any given impression, the winner is always the highest paying advertiser because all networks get the same priority (including Google).

It’s simple–you win when more advertisers compete for the attention of your user at the same time.



Maximize demand from Google’s real-time advertisers

Open Bidding is powered by the same technology used by the world’s leading publishers on Google’s DoubleClick platform. For more than ten years, DoubleClick has been connecting these publishers with thousands of advertisers looking to buy inventory in real-time across a variety of ad formats. Open Bidding brings the full benefits of this technology to AdMob to help you grow your revenue by letting all your networks and the real-time advertisers across Google’s demand sources compete in a unified auction.

Simplify operations and save precious development resources

Not only can you earn more with Open Bidding, but you can also eliminate tedious tasks such as updating CPMs, integrating multiple SDKs, and managing billing cycles. Here’s how Open Bidding works to keep your business running smoothly:

  • Real-time CPMs: Forget about manually updating CPMs. Open Bidding pulls in real-time CPM data directly from demand partners so you can save time, make more money, and eliminate costly mistakes. 
  • Simplified billing & payments: Unlike other solutions, we show you how various partners are doing in one centralized dashboard and we consolidate payouts from multiple partners so you have fewer things to worry about. 
  • Fewer SDKs: You now have the option to access demand from participating partners without adding new SDKs to your app -- all you need is the Google Mobile Ads (GMA) SDK.
Developers in the closed beta are already seeing benefits:
“One of the biggest challenges in monetization is managing the daily fluctuation of CPMs, when working with different networks. We’re excited to participate in Open Bidding because it allows us to hit the highest CPM per request, thus optimizing revenue and leaving no money on the table.”  
—Roy Tzayag, Head of Monetization, Ilyon Dynamics
Open Bidding is already live with bids from Smaato, Index Exchange and OpenX. As the mobile ads industry embraces real-time auctions to get greater access to your valuable inventory, we’re looking forward to integrating even more networks, including AdColony, over the next few months.
Want to test Open Bidding? Contact your AdMob Account Manager to sign up for this closed beta.


Posted by Vishal Kumar, Senior Product Manager

Source: Inside AdMob


Introducing the redesigned AdMob with new tools that make it even easier to earn

It has been a busy time here in Mountain View as more than 7,000 developers joined us at Shoreline Amphitheater for this year’s Google I/O. We made a number of big product announcements but I can’t help being most excited about one in particular — the newly redesigned AdMob!

Many of you rely on in-app ads for revenue — in fact, over 1 million apps now use AdMob to earn across iOS and Android. And to date, we’ve paid out over $3.5 billion dollars to developers like you. But we knew we could be doing even more to help you be successful. So we rebuilt the AdMob platform from the ground up to help you build a profitable business faster and to stay profitable as you scale.

Simple to use with a brand new user interface

Your time is valuable and we want you to spend it growing your business, not navigating our screens. With the new AdMob, everything from navigation to dashboards has been organized around your apps. The tools and features you need most are right at your fingertips. We’ve also applied Material Design across the entire AdMob platform to make your experience intuitive and productive at every step.

When you log in to the new experience, you’ll see a streamlined interface that surfaces key growth trends and gives you a quick snapshot of how your apps are performing. Whether you have one app or fifty, the new app picker will help you rapidly navigate through the new AdMob experience. In addition, we’ve added a simplified dashboard with a complete breakdown of your revenue. From here you can see how ads are impacting critical metrics like lifetime value, engagement, and retention for each app.
With the new AdMob, it’s easier to find your way to what you need

Richer insights with a deep integration with Firebase

We know that you have many different options when it comes to making money for your app business. Whether you decide to use in-app purchases, subscriptions, ads, or commerce, we know how valuable a holistic view can be for making decisions and monitoring how even slight monetization changes can impact user experience. Historically compiling all of this data has required multiple tools and has been time consuming at best and impossible for most. So we’re putting comprehensive analytics at your fingertips through an integration with Google Analytics for Firebase.

With this integration you can see new reporting across all of your revenue sources and dig deeper in Firebase to see how both lifetime value and user behavior are affected.

To get started, link your AdMob and Firebase accounts and update to the latest version of the SDKs. Once linked, you'll have access to detailed ad revenue data and user insights like time spent in the app and in-app purchases—all in one place. Your Firebase account can now access your ad signals and AdMob can access your app usage signals for deeper level insights. With instant access to detailed ad revenue data plus consumer insights like session duration and ad exposure you no longer have to deal with endless spreadsheets or make wild guesses.
Power a smarter monetization strategy with the right data, all in one place.

With a more complete view of lifetime value, you now have the data you need to create a monetization strategy with complete confidence. Marcin Krakowiak, co-founder of Byss Mobile, is already a fan: “Creating a sustainable monetization strategy has been the core focus of our team as we continue diversifying our portfolio of apps. Having meaningful, accurately connected data sources is key to developing that strategy. This new integration between Firebase and AdMob does just that. We are finally able to analyze lifetime value of both in-app purchases and ads to test and create a more profitable monetization strategy.”


Advanced controls to help you scale with Mediation Groups

If you already use AdMob, you know that mediation is a great way to monetize across multiple ad networks. Well, mediation just got even better with the addition of mediation groups.

Historically, you needed to configure mediation for every ad slot and geography. Developers using mediation often found this process extremely time consuming. We’ve introduced mediation groups in AdMob, to make all of this easier. Just set up mediation once and then assign that group to different ad units and countries across all of your apps in a single step. You can also make calls to outbound networks up to three times in a mediation chain, helping you to maximize revenue.
Set up and activate a new mediation group with just a few clicks.

We hope you’ll take advantage of mediation groups and everything else the redesigned AdMob platform has to offer — because it’s been built with you in mind! We’re here to support your success as an app developer, and we’re really excited to see how you use these new tools to grow your business. Become a part of the millions of apps using AdMob by putting our new monetization tools to work.

Visit the Help Center or contact your Google account team to see when you’ll have access to these great features.

Posted by: Duke Dukellis, Group Product Manager, AdMob











Source: Inside AdMob


Mobile Ads Garage: Episode 15 – Mediation adapters

A new episode of The Mobile Ads Garage has hit YouTube! If you haven't seen it before, The Mobile Ads Garage is a video tutorial series that covers how to use the Mobile Ads SDK to display ads from AdMob and Doubleclick for Publishers. Each episode covers one aspect of the SDK, breaks down the feature, and shows screencasts of real implementations on both Android and iOS – all in a friendly format.

After hearing from publishers that you’d like a smoother path to integrating mediation, AdMob has worked with a bunch of network partners to open the source for their mediation adapters. For those of you unfamiliar with the our mediation platform, mediation adapters allow the Mobile Ads SDK to interface with third-party ad SDKs to fetch third-party ads on your behalf.

Open source mediation adapters have a few key benefits. First, there are now two repositories on GitHub with adapter source that publishers can refer to for a look at the inner working of the adapters themselves. Second, it allows AdMob to take those adapters up to bintray, where they can be targeted with jCenter packages and CocoaPods. That means that instead of hunting down individual JAR files, publishers can simply add a line to their podfile or build.gradle, and get the adapter they need!

Included in this video is a breakdown of the new resources, as well as screencasts of Android Studio and Xcode that show how to import adapters for several networks.

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 share 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.

Remember to stay connected on all things AdMob by following our Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ pages.

Posted by: Ram Parameswaran, Mobile Ads Developer Relations

Source: Inside AdMob


Understanding App Monetization with Google AdMob

All views expressed in this blog post are solely those of the author, and not Google. This guest post is from Sreeraman Thiagarajan, a Google Developers Expert in the app marketing and monetization space and a published author on the Economic Times. Sreeraman is featured as our guest blogger to share insights and tips from his experience to help AdMob developers grow their earnings. If you’re new to AdMob, be sure to sign up here.

There’s never been a better time to be an app developer in India. According to reports referenced in the Economic Times, app downloads on Google Play from India grew from 3.5 billion downloads in 2015 to 6.2 billion downloads in 20161. Based on this report, India now holds the top spot in the world for apps downloaded on Google Play, even outranking the US and Brazil.

As noted in a recent article by Quartz India, nearly 90% of India’s over 220 million smartphone users have Android smartphones, so the ~6 billion app download figures comes as no surprise2. However, from a revenue perspective, Times of India reported that India is  far behind and does not feature as one of the top ten markets3. (According to Android Authority Japan, U.S, and South Korea rank highest4).

World over, an article in MarketWire states that iOS and Android app publishers earned over 89 billion dollars in 2016 as revenue from their app, which includes paid apps, in-app purchases (IAP), and of course ad revenue5.
Indian app developers are in need of proven app monetization techniques. When exploring revenue generation opportunities by deploying Google’s in-app advertising suite, AdMob is a great starting point.

Here’s how:

Don’t be shy or scared of using in-app ads. In my interaction with many startups and app developers, there’s a disturbing insight I’ve discovered. Many developers think using in-app ads are a clichéd way of generating revenue, and that they must come up with a unique and novel way of making money. Nope, it is not necessary to reinvent the wheel. Ad supported businesses have been thriving for decades . Besides being a source of income for a publisher, advertising subsidizes the price of a product for consumers. For example, if not for ads in a local newspaper, we may have to pay 10x or more than its current selling price. The concept of freemium apps may never have picked up as well.

Many of the largest and most recognizable apps use advertising to support their business model. Rather than reinventing their revenue models, they constantly innovate to maximize the ad revenue. From major sporting events to longstanding publishing houses to new age tech-based content providers, every one of them smartly leverages the power of monetizing the massive eyeballs they receive by showing ads, without disrupting the user experience.

An app or game is no different than our above examples. These apps and games can generate money through ads if they can garner users at scale and engage them frequently (converting them into DAU’s or daily active users). Google’s AdMob can help developers immensely in building an ad-supported app and in diversifying revenue streams beyond paid subscriptions or in-app upgrades and purchases.

Picking the right in-app ad platform:There are many options to chose from when picking an ad monetization platform. In fact, there are over 50 ad networks that app developers can choose from, or they can even build their own ad serving mechanism within the app to show ‘house ads’ - the ability to cross promote other apps or services of yours. Or one can also sell ad inventory (such as a masthead, a branded product placed within an app, or branded power-ups in games, etc.) through direct sales teams. However, building one’s own ad suite or depending largely on direct ads is not scalable, and warrants too much time and effort of developers and ad sales team alike to make this work profitably. This is where AdMob makes its biggest contribution in making life easy for both iOS and Android developers.

AdMob has a built-in mechanism that lets developers show ‘house ads’ to cross promote their portfolio of other apps for free. AdMob can also power your direct deals, which lets you run your own directly-negotiated ad deals with advertisers.

Another exciting feature of AdMob is ‘mediation’. Mediation is a technology which helps apps to maximize the number of ads shown in an app, and thus helps increase revenue. Through AdMob mediation, one can integrate nearly 40 different mobile ads networks and even engage in SDK-less mediation for a select set of networks. With mediation, apps can enjoy the benefit of dynamic bidding and direct integration with other ad networks, which allows automatic CPM updates. This eliminates time and effort taken to manually adjust bidding floors. In terms of in-app monetization, AdMob is one handy tool that has all you need to survive - and thrive.

Watch out for the part 2 in this series where we’ll discuss optimizing and measuring app monetization. Google has made a lot of resources available on AdMob here and if you are a developer with apps that has over 100,000 downloads you can request a free consultation here.

1 - http://tech.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/internet/india-is-top-market-for-google-play-store/56638573
2 - https://qz.com/886985/india-logged-the-most-android-app-downloads-and-usage-in-2016/
3 - http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/companies/india-number-one-in-google-play-app-downloads-usage/articleshow/56680067.cms
4 - http://www.androidauthority.com/google-play-performance-q2-2015-google-and-apple-gain-big-from-new-emerging-markets-626622/
5 - http://www.marketwired.com/press-release/app-annie-reports-publishers-made-over-89-billion-as-downloads-reached-90-billion-2016-2188696.htm

Source: Inside AdMob


Mobile Ads Garage: Episode 9 – AdMob Mediation

Episode nine of The Mobile Ads Garage is live on YouTube!

If you haven't seen it before, The Mobile Ads Garage is a video tutorial series that covers how to use the Mobile Ads SDK to display ads from AdMob and DoubleClick for Publishers. Each episode covers one aspect of the SDK, breaks down the feature, and shows screencasts of real implementations on both Android and iOS – all in a friendly format.

In this episode of The Mobile Ads Garage, we discuss mediation, which is a way for publishers to get multiple networks of advertisers competing to display ads in their apps. We’ll show you how AdMob mediation works and what it can do for your business. Learn the pros and cons of mediation, see the details of implementation, and find out whether it’s right for your app. You'll also get screencasts for Android and iOS showing the integration of a third-party SDK, plus links to samples, written resources, and Gary the Graphics Guy acting like his usual, snarky self.

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. If you have a technical question relating to something discussed in one of the episodes, you can bring it to our support forum.

Remember to stay connected on all things AdMob by following our Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ pages.

 - , Mobile Ads Developer Relations

Source: Inside AdMob


Mobile Ads Garage: Episode 8 – Rewarded Video Mediation

Episode eight of The Mobile Ads Garage is live on YouTube! If you haven't seen it before, The Mobile Ads Garage is a video tutorial series that covers how to use the Mobile Ads SDK to display ads from AdMob and Doubleclick For Publishers. Each episode covers one aspect of the SDK, breaks down the feature, and shows screencasts of real implementations on both Android and iOS – all in a friendly format.

Did you know that AdMob serves ads to more than two hundred countries and territories? To celebrate, The Mobile Ads Garage presents Episode 8 in two languages! Katie from the Mobile Ads SDK team stops by to help Andrew talk about rewarded video mediation. You'll hear the basics of how and why to use AdMob mediation and the Mobile Ads SDK to show rewarded video ads in both English and Chinese.

Rewarded video is a full-screen ad format in which users watch ads in exchange for something, typically an in-game reward. Because users hold the power of choice, they don't have to see ads they aren't interested in. Plus, publishers can build the view/reward cycle into the mechanics of their games, creating monetization strategies that actually increase user engagement. When you add all that to AdMob's ability to automatically prioritize mediated networks by eCPM, you've got a complete solution.


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.

Remember to stay connected on all things AdMob by following our Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ pages.

 - , Mobile Ads Developer Relations

Source: Inside AdMob