How to Unlock Hidden Ad Revenue in Google AdMob. Step-by-Step Walkthrough by Felix Braberg

So, if you're earning 3K a day, you might want to check this every two or three days. If you're earning $20 a day, you might want to check it only once a month, right? Because, yeah, improving things in the mediation dashboard, as we'll get into when we're doing AB tests. Usually, if you're making changes, you're able to sometimes maybe get low single digits or high or yeah, low double digit growth if you actually make mediation gains. So the more revenue you earn, the more you need to be living inside of your mediation platform. So here's what I recommend to check. [Music] The midnight crew [Music]

talkingh. [Music] Uh-huh. Hello everyone and welcome to another special episode of Two and a Half Gamers, the podcast where you can stay two and a half steps ahead of the mobile gaming industry. And we are having a very special episode today because it's only me and that can only mean one thing. We're going to talk about ad revenue or something ad revenue related. And today uh we're going to do a special episode digging deep on how to set up, optimize, and look at data in ADM Mob mediation. Uh, I essentially did

one of these with Tenjen a couple of weeks ago, but I felt it would be good actually to do another episode on our channel where we go a bit deeper on how to actually use ADM Mob mediation. So, this is one of our special insight episodes. I think we call them ASMR insights, but I don't know what we're calling them anymore, but I'm calling this getting started with ad revenue, uh, the ADM mob edition. And if you're curious to learn a bit more about the fundamentals of ad monetization, I actually did another episode on the fundamentals and introduction to ad monetization overall a couple of weeks ago which you can see on our uh on our Two and a Half Gamers channel. But enough about that. Let's get started uh about ADM Mob. Just a little bit about me. Been in the gaming industry for about eight years. Uh always working on the Admon side. I've been working in a DSP, ad network, and then a couple of gaming companies. Uh, right now I'm a consultant helping mobile games and mobile apps optimize their ad revenue.

Uh, I've worked with over 35 different mobile apps and games that I've earned about $350 million together while I managed their ad revenue. So, enough about me and let's actually get into the topic. So, ADM Mob Mediation is owned and operated by Google. Uh, it's actually one of it's actually the first mobile mediation platform that was built. It was built back in 2007 and then it was sold to Google I think in 2009 just as kind of the app space was exploding. So, this means that ADM Mob Mediation is probably one of the OGs in the mediation space. So, their uh mediation platform has been around the longest. We're also going to do uh deep dives on the other two mediation platforms, but essentially Google ADM Mob since it's been around the longest has some pros and cons. So if you're actually uh looking for a mediation

platform when you should actually consider using Google ADM Mob. The main pros of this mediation platform is that ADM Mob is super strong on banners. The average eCPM on banners on ADM Mob mediation is by far the highest in the industry. Also, what ADM Mob does is that it gives you very good control over the ad quality and creative length on video creatives. And what I mean with that is that for interstitial and rewarded videos, this is the only platform where you can actually go in and uh change the ad length settings for your end cards on Google advertisings. And account management for ADM Mob is really good. And also some of the thresholds to start actually being able to talk to a human being is some of the lowest. I believe as soon as you start earning about anywhere between uh $1,000 a day or above, that means you

can actually talk to someone in their small and medium scale large business teams. That usually means AM have x amount of clients. So, they do don't have that much time for you, but you can actually start by speaking to someone, which can actually help you quite a lot, especi especially if you're just getting started. Uh the cons of ADM Mob, so you kind of go into this platform with your eyes wide open, is that since it was built in 2007, um it's a bit clunky to use and it can take quite a lot longer to optimize things, uh compared to the other med mediation platforms, uh which is a bit annoying, especially if you have a large portfolio. Google are working to improve this, but I think it's going to take quite a while for them to actually make really big gains in this aspect. But we'll kind of show some of these issues as we go through this presentation. But uh video performance as well uh on other platforms has been known to have higher

ado and yeah those are pretty much the main ones. Also like the metrics are sometimes hard to extract but you'll see that as we go along with this presentation. So, if we get started once you actually set up your ADM Mob main page, this is what you'll see. So, this is the the main dashboard. What you're going to see uh when you open up your ADM Mob account every single time and the main things that you're going to go into is essentially reports, mediation, blocking controls. This is pretty much where you're going to live. But here's where you see all your data and they kind of give you a snapshot how you're trending today compared to yesterday, the last seven days to this. Um, it's a bit annoying to do these uh mediation deep dives because I literally asked about five or 10 companies to help me with their data and to let me use their ADM Mob dashboard. But no one wants to share this data because it's actually

revenue data which is quite sensitive. So, I've just blacked out or whited out all the essential information, but you can see here that the requests, match rate, earnings, eCPM, everything here is here. But this is where we're going to go into actually how to set up apps and how to set up ad units, mediation, and how to look at the various different revenue uh revenue metrics that you should keep a track of. So first to begin setting up an app when you start uh actually what you do is uh you go here on the side and you can see here it says apps above reports and when you click in there uh to set up a new app uh you essentially get this popup you make an app for your Android your iOS app and then you also need to give uh kind of the the link where it is in the various app stores and then you're actually able to set up your app and then After you've set up your app, you need to set up something called ad units. And this is essentially where

you're going to be getting uh your bids coming into, which we then set up for the mediation platform. So, here comes the first ADM Mob top tip, right? So, let's say you have a game where you have four different rewarded ad placements and two different banner placement and three different interstitial placements. Whatever you do in ADM Mob, don't set it up under unique ad unit numbers. And what do I mean by that? So, when you actually have that many placements, you actually need to go here and make a placement, right? So, you can make in the example I used before, for example, you would be able to make four different rewarded ad placements, which means you get different codes for the mediation platform. And what happens is in ADM Mob since it's a bit older compared to the other mediation is still a lot of stuff you need to click through actual physically to set up. So, what I highly recommend is that you make one ad unit

for all of your rewarded ad placements, one ad unit for all of your interstitial placements, and one ad unit for all your banner placements because that will save you so much time when you're setting up the mediation platform because essentially you have to do all the mapping otherwise in ADM Mob, which takes so much time, which can mean that kind of you're ripping your hair out. So that's the first ADM mob top tip. So once you go in here, you click in and you set up all your ad units. That means that you get an ad unit code. That's what you need to send on to your developer and that's what they put into your Unity or your app essentially to start showing the ads from ADM Mob mediation. Uh afterwards uh you essentially need to set up uh your mediation groups. So once you've actually set up the ad placements, you need to go into mediation and basically click here the big blue button which says create

mediation group. And what happens here is that if you don't set anything up or make a mediation group with other networks, everything is going to appear under ADM Mob default. And what that means is that this is a mediation group where there's only Google inventory essentially bidding on the different impressions. And if you actually watched the other intro video to ad monetization, you know this is not good because that means that your eCPM will be a lot lower because there's no competition on it. But this is also one of the main top tips I actually have for ADM Mob mediation on the mistakes I see that's commonly made when I'm actually working with someone who's on ADM Mob mediation that they have significant amount of impressions that they haven't mapped correctly under ADM Mob default. So once you've set up everything uh which we're going to go through right now on how to set everything up the kind of canary in the coal mine metric that you need to look out

for is that does the amount of impressions in ADM Mob default go to zero. If they're not at zero that means that you're leaving money on the table because that's unmediated revenue where there's no competition. Okay. So once you get in here, you can create a mediation group by clicking on this big blue button that says create mediation group. Pretty straightforward. Uh you're then faced with this beautiful popup where you can name your mediation group. Don't get smart with the mediation group names. Just call it for example all countries interstitial iOS just to keep it simple. And then essentially uh when you've made yourself a nice name uh that's when you click the blue button below called add ad units. And if you click in there essentially you are faced with the ad unit that you just created here. And just make sure you set up the right one.

And then what you can do is set up the different amount of or the different uh networks underneath the same place. Uh how you actually set up networks in mediation groups is you go under mediation, click on your new mediation group and says and you can press something called add bid source or add waterfall source looks like this. And essentially you can click in here and set up the various different ad units from your partner networks. So, if you're just getting started and if your ad revenue is only between maybe 0 to $500 a day, the networks here are the ones that I recommend to set up first. And what I mean by that is that uh for banners, I recommend you start with Meta. It's only really good on Android right now. Then you can look at Mint integral, Unity, Liftoff, and Digital Turbine. Uh these are really good networks for banners. So what that means

is you actually need to make an account with all of these different ones and then basically take the data from that account to set up in the ad source that's listed here in the picture the beautiful blue one for video I would recommend getting started with apploven unity and integral and the main thing is here right like I'm recording this on the 6th of April 2025 these ad sources they always differ in quality so if you're listening to this in 6 months in the future. This actually might be out of date and there might actually be better networks for you to add. What I usually recommend for this is go to the apps flyier performance index uh the most recent edition that there currently is and just look at the networks that are performing the best on a UA side because essentially that means that these same networks will perform really well as well on the monetization side. So these networks might actually change. So once you set up your mediation group with

your partner networks, they'll actually appear in the mediation group and then you just have to click save and that's all you have to do. Uh it's quite a lot of clicking on ADM Mob mediation but it's quite straightforward. It just takes a bit of time especially on the waterfall uh setups if you actually have that. So once you've actually set up all your ad networks, that means that you should be able to start seeing mediation data. Uh so basically your revenue, how much you're actually earning. So how to check that in ADM Mob is that after a few days of data, you can go into main menu, go on reports, and click on mediation. And then you'll be faced with a screenshot like this. Unfortunately, since it's very sensitive information, I wasn't be able to show you any real data here. So, I had to wide it out. But the main things that you need to keep a track of and how often you check this or the cadence of how often you need to check your data depends entirely on how much

ad revenue you're actually earning. So, if you're earning 3K a day, you might want to check this every two or three days. If you're earning $20 a day, you might want to check it only once a month, right? Because Yeah. improving things in the mediation dashboard as we'll get into when we're doing AB tests. Usually, if you're making changes, you're able to sometimes maybe get low single digits or high or yeah, low double digit growth if you actually make mediation gains. So, the more revenue you earn, the more you need to be living inside of your mediation platform. So, here's what I recommend to check on whatever frequency that you think makes sense for you. So first I would check the trend line of your overall impressions. Is there anything that looks normal or abnormal? So once you have maybe two or three weeks of data, you can see that your impressions are fluctuating. Sometimes people have more impressions on the weekend because their app or game is used more on the weekend. And then if anything deviates

from that norm that you're creating, you should probably find out why that is. So if it goes up by a lot, if it goes down by a lot, uh it could be an indication that something is broken. Also, eCPM, check the normal threshold here by clicking on the buttons. And if a network is really decreased or increased, email your network and find out why. And then get to the bottom of it. Uh the most important thing to check here also is just revenue by network. So every 30 days I highly recommend that you check the revenue per network as a percentage of the overall earnings. This is called your share of revenue. And this is essentially important because it gives you an indication of how good or competitive your ad stack is. So Google ADM Mob mediation is known is owned and operated by Google. So always the the biggest network or network partner you'll have on ADM Mob will be

Google, but it's also a good idea to see what the other networks are doing. So, if you have less than two or 3% share of revenue from another network, uh it's probably a good idea to switch that network because they're not contributing to the overall competitiveness of the ad stack. So, that's what I would look for in terms of data. Then, the second thing that you should also check on the similar cadence as you're checking the revenue data is the user activity data. And in ADM Mob you get here by pressing the main menu reports and mediate oh or user activity not mediation I put the wrong thing here on the slide. Uh but essentially here what you want to check is just the trend lines on what your users are doing and how how many ads they're watching. This is called AV uh ad viewers and basically just look here for trend lines. So, impressions per per AV or ads APV, which is essentially how much you're earning per ad viewers in your game or app. And this is just a good place to see if you

know users are watching more or less ads, if something crashes, just a good thing to look at both of these data points. So now we can actually get into something a bit more useful and that is how to optimize ad revenue inside of ADM Mob. So once you've actually set up your bidder networks and your non- bidding networks, you'll start to see a lot of data coming in here. And essentially how to read this intelligently, you actually need to do a bit of work because like I said, ADM Mob was built quite a while ago, which means that some other mediation platforms, you're able to set up the kind of data or the data that you need to make decisions on how to optimize uh your mediation stack. It's a bit more easy to get on other platforms, but in ADM Mob, you need to do a little bit of work. So what actually do you need to look out

for? So set up a uh mediation ads activity report. So you do this by going into app uh select one Android app and basically look at the last 7 days of data and in the dimensions uh you basically need to click on something called add source instance. Then you'll see all the data appear below. And then what you need to do is you need to click the three dots up in the corner that is highlighted here in green. And what that enables you to do is exporting this as a CSV file. What that means is you move everything out and essentially then you need to open it inside of an Excel sheet. You then need to do two main calculations uh to actually get some data from actually the different placements. I probably should have said that before actually. So you actually have something called bidder networks which is header bidding where basically algorithmically networks together come up with the highest price. But then you

can also do it the oldfashioned way which is actually setting up waterfall placements that we showed before on the other slide. Um I would probably say that more mediation is the mediation platform that's the furthest behind right now in the mediation movement where everything is moving from placements to header bidding. So that means actually you also have to do quite a lot of optimization here to actually increase your overall ad revenue. But if we get back to the CSV file that you just pulled right now, what you need to do is create two columns. So the standard way if you set up everything like I shown you here in the picture you essentially need to uh create next to the revenue column which will be re which would be column C you'll need to create a new column and basically work out the percentage earnings per instance. So that is the share revenue per waterfall instance in your whole waterfall.

Then next to the impressions column, you also also need to create a new column where you divide the amount of impressions uh by the amount of requests. So basically it's two different columns that you're dividing together. So that will give you the fill rate per instance. So now essentially you have two data points or at least two new columns that you made which is share revenue per instance and share or basically uh or fill rate per instance. So the goal in mediation is to have 1% uh fill rate and 1% uh overall revenue from each placement. If you have a higher like let's say you have a price point that's like $17 and that has a fill rate of 2% and a share revenue of 2%. That means essentially that that particular network for that placement is willing to pay a lot more. So, you should actually make a new placement that's a higher placement

than $17 in this example. If the $17 placement has lower than 1% fill and lower than 1% share revenue, for example, that usually is an indication that it's too high of a price point for that network and you need to move it down. Uh, usually I would recommend to essentially set this up in an AB test. And essentially how you decide on that is you have an Excel sheets and then you identify pockets of revenue where you can actually make more gains by setting up an AB test. So, how you actually set up an AB test in ADM Mob is that you go into mediation, mediation group, setup AB test, and then you need to go in here in variant B and add your ad sources here that you have identified from uh your yeah due diligence that we just went through, right? So, you can see it below here on waterfall. You basically have to add ad source on variant B and

then essentially you add all the placements in your ad stack that you've identified as pockets of growth and then through this here you set up a variant B waterfall that compares to your variant A waterfall which is exposed and control group and then what you have to do is this is the mistake I have made so many times. So if you go to the bottom uh here on this particular page for setting up an AB test in ADM Mob, there's a button called save and instinctividly like always I go down and think that the AB test actually starts when I press save. That's not the case. And then you come in back back to your mediation platform about a week later and nothing has actually changed because what you need to do is you need to press this button up here called start test. And then you need to click save. If you don't click start test and then save, the AB test won't start. So, for example, if you only press start test and then don't click save, then it doesn't start. So, it's another top tip

to essentially make sure you've started your AB tests. Uh, and that's essentially how ADM Mob mediation works. Uh, I will do two more follow-up videos. uh one on level play mediation on how to set up everything and launch AB test in uh level play mediation and then I will also start uh also do a video on max mediation how to set up everything in app max mediation. If you have any questions you please leave it in the comments or email us and we'd be happy to help you out to answer any questions you have on ADM Mob mediation. But I hope this was a good overview on how to get started with it. If you have any questions, reach out. And yeah, thank you for checking in and being with us on this lovely episode. Bye-bye. [Music]

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