AdMob Mediation: Top Tips and Best Practices

so this is kind of a rough framework on admob what I see working quite well so when you're between a hundred to $1,000 it makes sense to work with three Partners on top of the admob standard Google inventory that you get inside of admob so the four Partners I usually would work with to start off with especially on video would be hey everyone welcome to another edition of roy11 this is Roman from tangon and I'm joining by Felix Felix please introduce yourself hi uh I'm Felix uh yeah I I do ad monetization that's all you can say about it uh been in the industry for about eight years uh worked in a few dsps uh ad networks always on the supply side I worked for a couple big companies doing ad monetization now I a consultant

full-time working for quite a lot of them focusing on everything that increases ad revenue and you can also catch me on the twice a week podcast called two and a half Gamers uh where we talk about everything from UA game design and AD monetization we would definitely include all the links into the description of this video and uh you might have guessed that today's topic is also ad monetization and we'll go deep into the admob today um Felix originally created an article on the ad monetization and he dedicated one of the parts to admob and I thought like okay we can kind of dissect it and talk about it uh in this video um so I'll share some slides that I made based on the uh original article

um so uh Felix feel free to tell me if I got something like wrong in here oh yeah I'll definitely call you out if you did yeah yes yes yes um yeah so let's start so edop um Felix actually asked me like first like why why are we doing video uh about edop uh for me it was like Nob brainer because whenever like someone started work with Tangent they they uh their first I think their first ad mediation is a admob like Felix how would you answer this question why admob so admob is pretty much the first mobile mediation and there's actually something called the admob mafia because people who founded admob and it got bought by Google right went on to do

really successful and big things afterwards it's a bit like the PayPal Mafia so everything started with admob uh for example uh one of its product managers is today the CPO Chief product officer of unity and he built after mop after admob he built mopub and he also built Max before he got acquired by app loving so all roads kind of come from admol and it's the first one right so yeah there's some things that are really good about it there some things that are not amazing about it but if I have to say why admob there's one thing that admob is an absolute beast at and that is banners it is so good for Banner Revenue it just choose that Banner Revenue up like it's nothing it's uh really good for banners um but if I have an app right I would want to do all sorts of uh ad formats when I

moneti monetize an app right or or would I only focus on banners like in what basically I'm trying to ask in what cases a person should like definitely use admo so um usually there's different kind of answers for big and small clients right so you got to remember this is kind of also why uh I worked on this piece because because uh there's no real information out there about which mediation platform to use there's only company like marketing tools so you don't really know if it's true or not right because yeah no one really uses it so the the whole gaming industry on mobile is very longtailed and what do I mean by that that there's a very few Publishers who are earning a lot of Revenue and there's a lot of Publishers who are earning not that much right or not as much so

this kind of whole series is just for those developers who haven't really yet grown to make better decisions right so I think I looked it up the other day so Unity has 738,000 clients or people that use Unity right now and only about I think it was 1,800 of them earn more than $100,000 a year so yeah the spread is very longtail right so uh going back to your question about ad mob is they they obviously use all major ad formats but admob is really good for banners so if you have majority ad revenue on banners it's really good and it's still quite good on in justicial and rewarded uh but if you don't have Banner Revenue uh there are also other Solutions but also one really important thing to keep in mind right like the percentage differences we're talking about right now really only matter if you're probably earning $500 to $1,000 a day add revenue and that's

when you can start really seeing the differences right right yeah and admob is a mediation so I just want to cover all the bases here okay right um would you always recommend to use mediation uh to um a publisher as soon as you leave soft launch and you have ads you should use a mediation so mediation going from having one network to working with mediation even if you have a bad setup you'll double add Revenue all the time because essentially if you work with one network they have no incentive whatsoever to charge you or to pay you the highest ecpm possible because there's no competition so having worked in a network I can guarantee you that if that happens you will have the highest margins because there's no competition so mediation is extremely

important and I would say it becomes extremely useful even as you start scaling right so even a couple of like tens to $100 do a day it's still worth working with mediation because you know if you're earning 80 and go to 160 that can be a big difference for a lot of developers who are starting around makes sense uh let's go to the next one um so correct me if I'm wrong so I have a mediation SDK so just to talk about technical side a little bit Yeah and then I need the sdks of AD networks that I'm working with along with a mediation one exactly so you install the mediation SDK then you're able to work with a series of approved adapters that the mediation platform has Integrations and like a relation ship with and to get

access to all the other demand you will need to integrate the sdks or adapters so the best practices which I'm assuming you're getting to uh after this is that you don't want to have networks that don't pull their weight and that don't add any value but you also don't want to have too many networks and you don't have too few networks so you only want to work with network when they start adding value so this is kind of a rough framework on admob what I see working quite well so when you're between a hundred to ,000 it makes sense to work with three Partners on top of the admob standard Google inventory that you get inside of admob so the four Partners I usually would work with to start off with especially on video would be mintegral app Lin and unity that's

really good to start off on interstitials and rewarded video and Banners kind of mintegral is still decent on banners meta is really good on banners but unfortunately not on iOS anymore and then Google is just yeah crazy good on banners so yeah those are the ones I would start with right um and this sort of framework it depends only on what uh mediation you use right so this is a recommendation is like particular to admob so this is particular to admob uh it's quite similar on other mediation platforms like level play and Max uh yeah it's quite similar but yeah depends yeah this is what I would stick to on admob uhuh got it um so yeah this is a Formula that you had uh in the article

uh did I have do I have it correctly yeah so the most important thing how you judge a Network's overall performance is something called share Revenue uh this is different on the different mediation platforms on level play they call it share a wallet uh it's just a different word but what it is is quite simple uh what you do is you take all of your revenue and you divide it by how much revenue one particular network has brought in to to get the percentage right so you look at the percentage that a network has generated if it's lower than 5% basically it's not a good alignment with your inventory because essentially what's happening then is that a network is not really adding to the competitive state of your inventory so it's not really pushing other biders or other networks to pay more because it's bidding so little so if you have an like a network that's lower than 5% there's no point in keeping them right

because you got to also realize that having multiple networks also puts a strain onto your app and makes it topheavy you can get anrs those types of things so you want to limit unnecessary networks as much as you can and this is a great way to do that so this formula there's sadly no button for this in admob you actually need to go to reports and actually pull this report and calculate it yourself uh but it's very much worth it it's quite important at the core of getting a good ad monetization stack right and there're like so many ad networks right so you can I don't know test one every day I know it doesn't make sense but you can test so basically you should test uh a good hack that I usually say is uh go to uh like the rankings of the various ad networks and just look at like this rankings is done by a bunch of companies just look at the

rankings and for the space you're in and then just pick the big UA rankings accordingly because they will have a lot of money to buy in the same regions right so that's a good way of doing it yeah gotcha um yeah and uh I never set up uh ad mop account um so I imagine that' be like some easy stuff and some um very hard one or not obvious one R yeah so admob one of the cons I would say is probably was built it was built probably in like 2008 2009 I think or even earlier than that uh so it's quite old right so setting it up can be a bit clunky compared to the other Solutions on the market it still works fine you just need to be quite aware of what you're doing right so here is the admob main

dashboard with a mediation and here is where you will need to set up your mediation groups uh once you actually put it in so here's where you'll see a bunch of numbers and if you C click that big beautiful blue button that's when you can map out countries and the right ad placements and set up a mediation so is it it just so this is exactly what it looks like you came prepared yes yes yes I knew and it's the mediation group is it always one at type plus one GE or howp how admob is configured is that if you don't set anything up you only get Google inventory so that's the standard default if you integrate admob as a mediation and set it up you will get Google ads 100% of the time showing all the time right so to see multiple once you've implemented the SD and stuff you

will need to go here to set up uh the ad units which is the big blue button underneath that you click and you select the ad unit that you have and then you're able to scroll down and actually set up the other networks that you also integrated uh you need to get a couple of codes from another website from the other like network net websites and then you can set up the mediation here and the thing that catches a lot of people off guard is that there's save buttons at the bottom of every pages of admob and if you don't press them and press the X nothing gets saved you need to redo everything so that's probably one of the most common pitfalls when you set it up first if you don't press save nothing gets saved yeah probably some old ux patterns from the exactly yeah uh now like the next slide is about analyzing but any other like pitfalls uh about setting up an account in admob yeah uh you need to be so how it's done

it's done by ad units right so when you implement ads into a game or into an app what you do is you get a code from admob for the specific ad unit so let's say that you Roman you have a fast growing app you decide to put in ads so what you do then is you go and you make something called an ad unit inside of admob and that's a little snippet of code that you put into yeah your a snippet of code that you put in and it's like a number that's unique that gets called so a common Pitfall that I see so let's say you have Banner in your app room and on page one page two page three and Page four a common Pitfall that makes an absolute mess out of admob is that you have a different Banner code uh for each and every one of these pages right because then you need to set up the same waterfall like x amount of times instead of just sending it up once so it's really clever on admob to only use the the same code for interstitials rewarded

and Banners all the time right so under ad units if you have six let's say Banner placements that are have different codes you need to set up the code uh six different times which means you need to set up six different waterfalls to map it out in the same way so admob is really built to have one code you can split it up but there's no real need to split them up or do anything like that and it makes life so much easier for you if you do this got it and um so I I've launched an app uh and how often do do I go into the this like setups every every time when I want to add a partner at a partner so it depends right so like if you have everything on bidding so admob is working quite hard to move more and more Network Partners to bidding there's less kind of work to do but if you have a lot of Partners on

waterfall and you're earning a lot of Revenue you will need to do quite a lot of work especially if you're earning you know 5 to 10K a day then you know playing around in here can definitely increase your ad Revenue significantly so then you probably need to check this every two three days yeah yeah got yeah um talking about checking something every two three days uh the data ah the data yes yeah it's it's a bit of a shame for these for this article because like I I can't use real data because clients get very upset because they're very secretive about it but here's what the data dashboard looks like there's graphs and things that populate this obviously uh but this is the main setup right so usually what you look at every day is you look at earnings you look at Impressions per like Impressions per users and you look at if anything is deviating from the norm has anything shot up has anything gone down and if it has you basically you need to investigate why so I had a client uh in

July and one of the networks just stopped bidding it went from a th000 a day to $2 a day and we had no idea what it was turns out it was like a tracking issue and then we needed to reach out to the network and they need to fix it otherwise we would have lost a ground a day basically so this is why you need to look at the stuff not there's not very often that something happens but when something happens it gets expensive real quick I see is there like any alert system uh don't know actually not that I I always look right so I'm I'm My Own alert system but other mediation dashboards have alert system so I wouldn't be surprised if has it I haven't actually looked but I'm sure there is okay yeah yeah uh there were a bunch of other reports let me jump through like user user activity Port so these are the two main ones so you check the revenue ones that's where you have ecpm Impressions and stuff like that and

then also it's really good to also check the user activity report it's called user activity because it's more uh user based metrics so like imp ad viewer rate those type of things like how many percentage of users are watching ads per day how many percent how many ads users see per day you can also check that if something is fluctuating uh anything here that you would recommend to look at I'm not sure a metric or um type of graph whatever um I would probably say like I'm assuming we have another slide later on on the optimization part that that's probably like the hardest thing to explain but here what you're looking for is anomalies right so what you're looking for here is if anything is crashing increasing you need to find out why right okay and then there's also benchmarks that you can pull for whatever category you're in and this is the place to basically Benchmark yourself against other people in industry right so uh for example what's

in puzzle what's considered good uh it's very different from like a midcore or a casual game but for example you know that you want to show at least 90 Banner Impressions per day to users to non-payers to have a standing chance to earn a lot of AD revenue from banners there's different kind of benchmarks that you can ask but you can ask Google reps or anyone else uh kind of working for these big companies for these benchmarks mhm and um is it new like that it's inside of the Dort or it's always been there the user activity report is new it hasn't always been there uh they uh they added I think a few years ago to basically keep up with the times but uh yeah and how was a benchmarks like two questions about the Benchmark does the data make sense to you and the second question how is the taxonomy like the categories do they make sense because the App Store categories don't really make sense what I usually do is um you play a game

right and you see if it makes sense but usually also you ask the people that you work with like well who are the competitors the main competitors is your in space and you know some are pretty clearcuts like word games or something like that and some are pretty not right so it's a bit of a difference yeah right we we'll share some uh benchmarks from your article a bit later but yeah yes what is this so this is how you understand so what I said before right so admob has some networks on bidding which means that you don't need to optimize a waterfall but it also has quite a lot of networks still that haven't moved to bidding so if you don't have it on bidding you need to set up something called a waterfall so this is essentially instructions how to actually read your waterfall and to see if you

need to optimize it and what to change right so this is where admob becomes a bit clunky um because you need to First pull a report from or like first set up the report in admob so the way to do that is you take one of your apps so let's say Roman's fantastic marketing app Android and he selects the last seven days and then you click on the dimensions and select like what type of AD unit you want to look at so the waterfall so let's say we start with banners then you need to click on ad Source instance and then at the bottom you'll get a clear view of your waterfall with the bids and with the placements then what you need to do is you need to pull this as a CSV file right and then you need to upload or like open the CSV file and then you need to basically create a couple of columns and what you need to create is share of

Revenue per placement of the overall revenue of the waterfall and the overall what you can say or the fill ratees so basically you calculate the request minus the Impressions to get an idea of what fill rate is and how you optimize is that if a network has more than 1% fill on one placement let's say like a 23 placement on justicial is filling at 6% and um yeah it's a big percentage of the overall like uh Revenue that means that you can probably take that Network and add a placement at $35 for example so it gives an indicator what like a network is willing and able to pay and this is what takes a bit longer because in other Solutions this is kind of already calculated for you so it's a bit more leg work but it doesn't take that long right but this is the most

important thing that you need to do and you need to do this pretty much every probably one or two weeks because otherwise you can lose quite a lot of money if you don't have the right price points gotcha and does it make sense to do it even more often just to be it depends on the size of your app right so it never make sense to really check this more than seven days but if you have an app that's earning 80k a day then you know probably when you're running these tests you're improving the adarp though by two or 3% so it makes sense if it's big enough so calculate like the estimated gains that you can get from running these tests is between two to 3% so if you know if you're earning 10K a day that 23% is uh $2 $300 a day right so maybe maybe worth someone's time to do it if you're bigger than that it increases right if you're earning $20 a day not worth your yeah I I just remembered about oh like

on the UA side there is also like this algorithms algorithms uh they they take time to learn and so on so forth you know exactly kind of uh as promised Benchmark time from your article what do we see here so this is probably the thing I have to talk to clients the most about spe specifically since I work quite a lot on the placement design and add placements in games right so there's quite a big disconnect between developers and what knowing kind of what the value of an impression is so I've worked sometimes with developers that are like yeah let's put in a rewarded out here we'll make money and it's just like getting one rewarded out impressions in America for example might generate you one or two

cents three if you're lucky right per impression so it's quite low so you need to have a lot of your user base watching a lot of ads so these are kind of just benchmarks what is considered good or bad so if we start with rewarded uh usually what you say is you want an ad viewer rate or percentage of users that see or interact with a rewarded ad to be at least 45% or above if it's below this that usually means your rewards aren't high enough or the placements aren't prominent enough and like I said with rewarded you really want to aim for around five uh so half your user base watching about five rewarded ads per day because that will generate you about 10 cents to 15 cents in the states of LTV per day as you have users so then you can kind of start seeing how ads actually have a meaningful impact on your overall LTV right uh interstitials this is a bit more for

puzzles I'd say but here you want to have 60% to 70% ad viewer ratees and around seven interstitials per day on that portion of the user base and on like puzzle or more casual genre you want to have 70 to 80% of users seeing banners and you need to have at least 70 or more Banner Impressions to actually start having a meaningful impact on your bottom line got it uh any other bench that maybe you have on top of your mind usually like the most important thing in ad monetization is ADD AR because it's the only metric that gives you a clear indication of how your ads are performing no matter what your UA campaigns are doing right so Adar is the main thing to watch and also if you keep only talking about ecpm with networks they kind of will assume you don't really know what you're talking about so ad ARP out is the most important thing you got it

uh but it will also depend on like the game genre countries so yeah exactly yeah there is no people can reach out if they need any help but yeah yeah makes sense uh you mentioned it like a couple of times right if the network is on beating or if the network is on waterfall um maybe let's explain the difference yeah so waterfall is this Legacy product from the early stages of mobile when ads started becoming a thing and there was not that much Tech around it so essentially what you needed to do was you have a network you build price points and you have them compete in a mediation platform like this in a waterfall so you basically go up and down a waterfall for the different price products and what you do is yeah you call ads and then you need to set it up and it's a lot of manual work now we're finally moving to something called header bidding and that means basically

programmatically the highest price point is reached um it's also a bit weird right because Publishers are moving away from being price Setters to price takers by this movement right so is a very different Market because essentially it's the only one that I can think of where basically you don't really own the price of your demand it's actually set by someone else right so it's quite interesting and uh like when I research like everyone is boasting that they do real time beaing but no one of course is boasting that they do waterfall how many of or do they I mean it's different from mediation platform to mediation platform right so max I on Max I would say that 90% of revenues on bidding on level play probably 70 add m I would probably say it's 50 or 60% or

probably over 70 I'd say by now so it depends a bit on the mediation I see but yeah like water moving away from waterfall to real-time bidding is a good thing it's pretty much what we saw on web ages ago what the main difference is on mobile is that all these platforms Are Walled Gardens so we get real time bidding but we don't get the benefits of the other things that you have on desktop or at least yet because they're PR and why is this difference for the like ad mop you said 50 marks have 90% is this like a difficulty for adance it takes a lot time to build biders and make them better than waterfall cuz say what you want it's really like a lot of manual labor but it works really well like it's just a really good way to get a higher price points right or high price points it's not the most efficient but it's a good way so it's hard to beat I see you got it

yeah uh this one was new for me I think this is a one is it a product from Google it's a Google ad unit called app open ads and what it is it's a splash screen intertial that covers 70% of the screen when you open your app or game right so if you think about it it essentially allows developers to start off every like session with a revenue events so it's just a intrusive ad unit that's uh in Vogue right now especially in the hybrid casual hybrid casual genre mhm uh do you have an opinion is it good is it bad or is it like everything else I would say the Google version of this is okay there's already some other developers that are what can you say like testing the limits of what an app open ad can be there's some developers that are coding the messaging themselves and then calling a normal interstitial ad unit

for example which has a much higher ecpm than the Google ad unit but uh the jury is still out on this and it's still early days uh I do think that the hard coding version yourself with intertial will win but it's still early days no one knows I see yeah yeah got it next one is about admob and Firebase I heard it from someone and I saw it in Firebase documentation that it kind of improv the performance of admob but is it just a text just a brag or it does it does yeah uh it's hard to put a number on it but when I have seen clients where we have admob and then integrate Firebase or even a Google admob account on another mediation and then put in Firebase there is an uplift in Google Revenue sometimes it's small sometimes it's big but the uplift here like it's it's not going to make or break an up right it's going to be in the low single digits of percentage on Google Revenue not on

anything else yeah got it but it takes two seconds to do so stupid not to do it gotta gotta yeah um any other things about ad mop that we haven't mentioned here but we really need to mention no I mean admob is a solid platform a lot of developers start to use it uh what I would say is they have a lot of really good account managers that are attainable to reach like you don't have to reach like a crazy daily ad Revenue to reach them I don't know what the cut off is but on the other ones you have to spend or earn quite a lot of money before you talk to a human being at Google they have small count account managers medium and large styes so it's like you can be like pushed into one of those quite quickly so you can speak to someone they're quite knowledgeable so they know their stuff um that's probably what I have to say about that also one thing that admob is really good at is AD quality so admob has great ad quality uh they're going to launch really soon

longer ad formats but you have control over setting it yourself so that's probably the only thing we haven't talked about right now but I think this is a really comprehensive view of adob got you thanks a lot um maybe the last thing a prediction for 2025 [Applause] forid more bidd yeah add Revenue ad Revenue has been strugg struggling a bit as of late especially with the move to bidding has had like a negative impact on ecpm but I think we've seen the worst of it and it's going to Plateau out now so it's going to be better nice love your positivity yeah alrighty that's it give us a like leave a comment we'll ask uh Felix to respond um your questions if you have any on ad monetization um yeah and thanks Felix anything any final PL two and a half Gamers listen to

two and a half Gamers we have two episodes a week on exactly these topics uh we'd love for you to come and subscribe if you have any questions about ad monetization specifically uh I'll send you the emails you can put in my email so you can put it in here and just drop me a note we'll do all righty and have a great one cheers bye bye