This is using AdMob: banners (a lot) & interstitials (a lot) & rewarded video (once a day), most users in the United States/Europe (but I got people all over the world), 30 second refresh rate.
Also running Facebook Audience Network native ads, which are even worse - about 1/3 of what AdMob earns me. Makes no sense cause those FAN ads are super pretty and there are more of them…
70-100k eyeballs a day and can’t even afford a burrito, double meat + guac being completely out of the question… This makes me really sad. Should I just get a job? :c
^ No, I am not 100% sure. My app uses lists where the banners are shown every N rows. Is it better to just have a banner fixed at the bottom of the app, visible at all times? Also my app has a lot of tabs. For example if you see an ad on one tab, then change tabs, what happens now? It is very confusing to me. It is possible to count the impression even if they can’t see it?
Does it even matter if they can see and click it, really? Obviously clicking it is always good, but I don’t get paid just per 1000 impressions? I only get paid for clicks? Does showing more impressions ever actually hurt me?
It never hurts you, no. Ideally you don’t want to be loading ads that aren’t shown, but hiding and presenting views is easier. We all do pre-load interstitials that might never be shown already anyway.
I hear you. Yeah, I think some of those impressions might be not visible. I recently compared stats with someone who has an app with a lot more daily users than I do, who makes a lot more money than I do, and his impressions are only a quarter of what I have. Something is definitely off. I think I’m going to try one single banner fixed at the bottom of the screen for no ambiguity.
So you’re saying there’s no algorithm that’s like:
“Okay for how many daily active users this app has, they are showing too many impressions, and they are not being clicked, so let’s flag this app as a low quality spammer app and give them ads that don’t pay.” ???
Because the way I think about it is that if I was an advertiser, I wouldn’t want to be paying for my ads to be shown on an app that doesn’t bring results, so I feel like this would be factored in somehow. No?
So what actually earns me more money? Why am I getting nothing? If it isn’t more impressions, do I simply need a higher CTR? If I add more networks using a mediation service, will that probably help? Cause right now I am only using AdMob. Can you go into a little more detail about what you meant by “low engagement”?
Clicks are the most important for AdMob. For sure they will have some Ads who pay per impressions and not per click, but even there you will get higher pay rates if your placements have good conversions (maybe a lot more is involved, but Clicks are at the base of this anyway)
Admob is run primarily through clicks (and conversions?). They only payout for clicks and advertisers only pay for clicks. If you as a developer have a lot of impressions, but not a great CTR, then it’s only a problem for you.
They do have some impression based campaigns, but they are rare and I don’t believe developers can see those reflected in their data. (You used to be able to, in the early Admob days.)
Your CTR is what will have the biggest impact on your revenue. There’s only so much you can do for banner CTR - show the ads, make sure they are always visible when intended, place them in sensible areas and find a good refresh rate (Admob can mange this via “Google Optimised” setting now, which is probably the best idea.
Admob provide more information on CTR for interstitials. You may want to try their native ads, but I personally haven’t had worthwhile results there. Check out their guide here: Interstitial ad guidance - Google AdMob Help
Give AdinCube a try for mediation, they only deal with high level traffic apps (10k impressions per ad unit per day). Appodeal are meant to be good too, but I haven’t used them.
When I said “low engagement app” I meant that the user isn’t focused on the screen very much. Apps like Flashlights, wallpapers, screen break prank etc etc would meet this criteria which is bad for ad conversion.
The banners are the type of ads that have to be shown at all times - you can get banned for showing ad that is not visible. If you still want to display ads in a list use native ads.
