Given all the talk about cross-promotion among developers, I tried to create a “House Ad” on admob.
Here is the sequence of events …
So promoting own app in the banner ad space of another of your apps.
In admob - clicked on Sites & Apps - House Ads.
Created a “campaign” - which had a running time (default was for a week or so - with a start and end date/time). If you change it to something shorter like 2 days it shows a red mark on the end date - don’t know what that means.
Give it a “campaign name”, then an “adgroup name” (I guess this is different varieties of ads all under the same “campaign”).
Chose an ad type - there was a choice of “banner and text” and “android app download” (chose this). If you choose the android app option - the Ad URL becomes a “market://” link i.e. as you would give for an app on Google Play.
You can choose to provide an image, but I chose the text ads - and just wrote down a text line.
Entered the market:// link for the app that was requiring promotion.
There was a box for “display URL” which only has space for 32 characters or something - in the end just typed play.google.com in there - that seemed to get accepted.
There were checkboxes next to the apps you have on admob - and checked the app that was going to display the banner ads.
Then there was a “impression goal” - I checked “full allocate” - which I am guessing refers to the “House Ads” i.e. this campaign gets 100% allocation of the House Ad stream.
Apart from this - decided to add “Admob House Ads” as another “advertiser” to the banner ad mediation for the app that is showing banner ads.
I went into admob mediation for the app showing the banner ads - and while I had currently setup to:
Admob 75%
AppBrain 23%
Greystripe 1%
mmedia 1$
I changed that to (i.e. shifted some Admob traffic to house ads):
Admob House Ads 100%
Admob 0%
AppBrain 0%
Greystripe 0%
mmedia 0%
Then I may have “run” the House Ads just to make sure they were running.
After some rebooting of the phone and waiting around for no ads appearing for some time - maybe about 10 minutes later started seeing the banner ads.
Here is the format of the banner ad as it appeared on screen:
In addition to the demo shown when you entered the text - the banner ad ALSO includes the title of the app and the rating stars and the number of reviews ! - so you really need to make sure your text fits in the first line (though admob warns you if you go over into the second line) - I suspect this won’t be the case for the banner and text ads.
Perhaps if one really wants to tailor the banner to exclude the display of ratings etc. - one can use the “banner and text” option instead of “android app download” option (discussed above).
This may then have just the text you enter.
I suppose one COULD setup a between-developer setup - where instead of a market:// link one would use a redirection URL - which maybe a redirect by the developer website - this way they can count how many redirects they are getting from another developer.
Of course there could be a central website which does this redirection for developers - and that would provide stats that developers could quote as definitive etc.
CONCLUSION - Admob House Ads - for the banner ads using simple text - and pointing to Google Play app download - are working. Now to see how impactful this is for downloads. Of course much will depend on the text copy and the relatedness of the other app to the app running the banner ad.