Ads implementation

Hey,

I would like to add ads to the next version of my game, but I’m an absolute dummy in mobile advertising.
So far (mostly after reading this forum) I understand that there are lots of ad networks with different levels of profitablility and fill-rate.
So to achieve best results and close to 100% fill rate, I need to implement several networks at once. Is it right?

Is there a tutorial or giude or sample code explaining how to do this?
I will also appreciate any useful tips and advices! :slight_smile:
Thanks!

Íf you install admob - your fillrate will be near 100% when allowing it to show google ads.

An alternative would be adwhirl. You just implement adwhirl in your code and then can ad multiple ad networks to your adwhirl account.

All of them have tutorials online

Thanks!
So if I want to use several networks, I should use adwhirl? Is this the only option?

No there are other “ad servers” (adwhirl = google) as well and you could also implement your own … like I did with admob and madvertise.

But to be honest, an adserver is better because you don’t need to deploy an update, when you change something on the priority of or add new ad networks

I set up AdMob, but in my app it only shows me the same two banners over and over again (bookings.com and some poker site). I waited several hours, but nothing changes, still same 2 stupid banners… Is this normal?

Refresh rate is 30 seconds and I didn’t set any filters.

lower your refresh rate to 120 … if your CTR is very low you will not get high paying ads or ads at all

Thanks, I will do this.
But the question is - will users also see just 1-2 banners over and over again with AdMob?

By the way, I have an idea about having ads in the main game screen, where users can click banners by mistake. Maybe I can listen for tap on banner area and display a dialog to user, something like “Do you want to open this ad? OK/Cancel”
What do you think?

EDIT: seems like it’s not possible to pause dispatching touch event and display a dialog.
So here is a possible workaround - the game will ignore first click on a banner and display a toast to the user “If you really want to open this ad, tap it again.”

As long as you have no control over the sourcecode of the sdk you cannot interrupt the click on the ad.

With nearly every ad network it is the same: if your ctr are low, you will not get many different banners (only the low paying ones) because they deliver ads more likely to apps which have a good conversion rate (better for everyone)

So if you will have a good CTR (> 2%) you should get more banners. You can raise the CTR normaly by decresing the refresh rate - hopefully.

If a banner is clicked by mistake that can have various reasons, some of them are good and some of them are bad.

Bad: User wanted to click a part of your game but hitted the ad
Good: User thinks the ad is part of your ad and clicked it because he saw it and wanted to click it.

the last one is good, the first not, because the intention of the user was to get more info about the ad (in the good) way.

You should avoid the bad way, because, if that happens to often, admob will maybe inspect your game and found it as fraud and close your account (or app)

Thanks for the detailed answer!

I am not going to hack into the source code.
In my game I have a transparent layer (view) above all other views that handles all touch input.
I put AdView under this layer also.
So when a user taps the ad, motion event is first caught in this layer and then it can either consume it or let it go to the AdView.

I’ve actually tried this already and it works. When I tap a banner the first time I see a toast, then I have ~10 seconds to tap it again.

Does this break any rules? Can my app get banned for this?
I’m not doing anything bad, just want to protect users from misclicks.

That’s a nice approach :slight_smile:

I know from adsense, that is not allowed to overlap the ad with any kind of element. Not quiet sure how admob handles this …

If I would guess, I would say that it is not allowed but it is better to ask admob directly about this issue, maybe they say it’s ok