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The Mobile Ads Garage is a new series that covers how to use the Mobile Ads SDK to display ads from AdMob and Doubleclick For Publishers. Each episode will cover one aspect of the SDK, break down the feature, and show screencasts of real implementations on both Android and iOS – all in a friendly format. With two episodes on banner ads on the books, the Mobile Ads Garage now turns its focus to interstitial ads. Andrew and Gary the Graphics Guy are back this week with a detailed explanation of the interstitial ad lifecycle, how to load ads, and how to display at just the right time. Along the way you'll get screencasts of Android Studio and Xcode, plus links to guides, samples, and other resources. If you like the video, save the Mobile Ads Garage playlist to your YouTube Playlist collection and you'll never miss an episode. We’d love to hear which AdMob features you’d like to learn more about. The comment sections for the videos are open, and you're welcome to toss out i

Six years ago, Cheetah Mobile began as a small company of ten employees that built softwares for PCs. Today, they’re one of the world’s leading developers with over one thousand employees. Their popular apps Clean Master and Battery Doctor have been downloaded by millions around the world. “What we also enjoyed is seeing the speed at which AdMob is innovating, delivering new features. One good example is the support for native ads.”   - Charles Fan, Chief Technology Officer, Cheetah Mobile The problem With a growing user base, Cheetah Mobile needed a partner to help them expand to the global market while monetizing their apps. The solution Cheetah Mobile turned to Google as their first partner, using AdWords to drive downloads and AdMob to increase revenue from their apps. The results Within three years, Cheetah Mobile saw its user base grow 16X with 600M active users. 74% of their users came from outside of China and after implementing native ads for its popular Battery Doctor app,

Crossposted from the The Firebase Blog Eighteen months ago, Firebase joined Google . Since then, our backend-as-a-service (BaaS) that handles the heavy lifting of building an app has grown from a passionate community of 110,000 developers to over 450,000. Our current features -- Realtime Database, User Authentication, and Hosting -- make app development easier, but there’s more we can do, so today, we’re announcing a major expansion! Firebase is expanding to become a unified app platform for Android, iOS and mobile web development. We’re adding new tools to help you develop faster, improve app quality, acquire and engage users, and monetize apps. On top of this, we’re launching a brand new analytics product that ties everything together, all while staying true to the guiding principles we’ve had from the beginning: Developer experience matters . Ease-of-use, good documentation, and intuitive APIs make developers happy. Work across platforms . We’ll support you whether you’re buildi

Advertising experiences on mobile are evolving quickly , providing developers with a wide variety of ad formats to help them make money from their apps. Now, when consumers are on a mobile device while waiting for a bus, getting some ‘me time’ at home, or countless other situations, they’re just as likely to be delighted by a video ad, as they are to click an interstitial ad and view a product that’s captured their interest. Yet, mobile screens are small. Any content that’s poorly designed, or enters the app’s flow when a user least expects it, can disappoint users - and the same rules apply to ads. Native advertising has emerged as a way to create a more seamless ad experience on mobile, one where ads match the look and feel of an app’s design. It isn’t a new idea, yet it hasn’t been within reach of all developers; many of today’s native ad solutions require significant resources to implement and can be an ongoing burden that’s difficult to scale. Who wants to be writing lengthy code

Cross-posted from the Inside AdWords blog . Last year at Google I/O, we shared our mission to make app growth easier with the launch of Universal App Campaigns - one simple campaign that surfaces apps to billions of consumers who use Google Play, Search, YouTube, and more. It’s working, and more people are discovering apps on Google than ever before. Over the past year -- and thanks to Universal App Campaigns -- we've more than doubled the volume of app installs driven by ads, and to date we’ve delivered more than 2 billion downloads to developers. Today at Google I/O, we’re announcing multiple improvements to Universal App Campaigns to make it an even more powerful tool for app developers to find the right users for their app. Making app growth simple for iOS developers First, Universal App Campaigns are expanding beyond Android to help developers grow their iOS apps. Now, all app developers can tap into the simplicity and power of Universal App Campaigns to reach billions of And

The AdMob Student App Challenge deadline is fast approaching (June 28th) and we can’t wait to see your creative ideas come to life. To make sure you’re fully prepared, join us for an informational Hangout on Air on May 20th. We’ll be sharing the competition’s judging criteria, tips on how to build an app that stands out, and answer any lingering questions that you might have. Here are the details: Date: 20th May 2016 Time: 5:00 pm to 5:45 pm (IST) Join Hangout on Air You can ask questions in advance by: a) Posting your question as a comment here or b) Up-vote someone else’s question by giving it a +1 if you have the same query. Feel free to share these details with anyone you think would be interested in participating. With a little over a month left, it’s not too late to register a team and build an app. We look forward to seeing you all on the Hangouts on Air ! Posted by Shefali Arora AdMob Student App Challenge Team

AdMob Mediation is an easy way for you to manage different ad networks and help maximize revenue, all from a single interface. With AdMob Mediation, you can also take advantage of ad network optimization , a feature that helps you generate the highest CPM from your mediation stack. Ad network optimization does this by obtaining the freshest CPM from each ad network based on historical performance, and dynamically reorders them in the mediation stack, so that the ad network with the highest CPM serves ads to your apps. Today we’re excited to announce that we’ve enabled ad network optimization support for Chartboost and Unity Ads, with country-level specific CPM support. They will join over twenty of our existing supported ad network optimization ad networks . Getting started with ad network optimization is easy; simply select the ad network(s) you want to add to mediation, enter your ad network login credentials and AdMob will pull the accurate CPM data for each network. 1. In ad netwo

Google I/O 2016 is less than a week away (May 18-20th), and we’ll be there. Google I/O is for developers — the creative coders who are building what’s next. This year they’ll be dozens of talks discussing important topics that matter to you like, design & development, monetizing and growing your business, and the latest in tech, mobile, and more. Here are some of the key sessions we’d suggest you check out at I/O 2016: Wednesday, May 18th Keynote: 10AM PST - Live streamed Join us to learn about product and platform innovation at Google, starting with a live kickoff from Google CEO Sundar Pichai. Use analytics to build extraordinary apps: 3:00 PM PM PST / Stage 2 | Hydra  - Live streamed The average smartphone user taps and swipes their way through 1GB of data each month. But how can you turn user behavior into meaningful insights that help you build a brilliant app? The answer is app analytics! In this session we'll explore the key metrics you need to know through the app life

Meet our final two judges, Craig Warner and Jon Potter. Craig brings a wealth of experience from a Google perspective, while Jon provides insights from the Application Developers Alliance. Read below for their perspective on app development: their suggestions will be a major part of the judging criteria for the AdMob Student App Challenge . Craig Warner Head of Publishers, Domains and Distribution, Google What is your background and experience working with apps? Help support the leading global app creators to make money through ads and in-app purchase. What is the most important thing you look for when reviewing an app? Simplicity. What tip(s) would you give to a new app developer building their first app? Ask yourself if you would actually use the app for more than a day. What are some golden rules of app design? Transparency about how you collect and use user data.  Performance and stability. Anything else you want student developers to know? Apps are not new, it was the way users in

Ever wondered about the best ways to monetize with banner ads while maintaining a great user experience? If so, the Mobile Ads Garage is here to help. In the third episode, Andrew and Gary the Graphics Guy cover how to integrate banner ads into a mobile app's UX, with a little help from Aunt Betty, hairless cats, and discount moose repellent. You'll see detailed breakdowns of things to avoid, plus reliable best practices that you can take back to your own apps. As always, links to guides, samples, and other resources are included. If you like the video, save the Mobile Ads Garage playlist to your YouTube Playlist collection and you'll never miss an episode. We’d love to hear which AdMob features you’d like to learn more about. The comment sections for the videos are open, and you're welcome to toss out ideas for new episodes and examples you'd like to see. If you have a technical question relating to something discussed in one of the episodes, you can bring

For this week’s “App Monetization Insights” post, we’d like to share an excerpt from AdMob’s newest eBook, The No-nonsense Guide to In-app Ads (download it here ). This guide is designed to provide a practical introduction to in-app advertising for developers exploring ads for the first time. The excerpt we’re sharing today covers how an ad network works and how it can help your app business. Enjoy! Ad networks do the hard work of bringing together the parties that participate in online advertising, making it simpler for everyone involved to succeed. They build relationships with businesses looking to advertise and apps looking to make money by selling ads. Through an ad network, advertisers can get access to lots of different inventory in apps at scale. And, they also help app developers find advertisers quickly. You can spend less time marketing your advertising space and more time focused on creating the best app for your users. Take a look at this simplified illustration showing ho

After introducing Chris Akhavanr and Purnima Kochikar in the last blog post , we would like to introduce our next two judges for the AdMob Student App Challenge : Robert Unsworth and Gregory Block. They are part of a six-person judge panel that will judge your app, and decide on the Grand Prize winner. As a reminder, the Grand Prize winner will score a week-long trip to San Francisco, including a visit to Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, as well as have their app featured on the Google Play store. To help you better prepare, we’d like to share some of the insights we gained from getting to know them, as well as what, in their view, makes a great app! Robert Unsworth VP Americas, News Republic What is your background and experience working with apps? 12 years working in gaming, social and media apps across the globe. What is the most important thing you look for when reviewing an app? Usability and efficiency - within 60 seconds do I understand what it's for and how I need to

We’ve all been there. You’re trying to send an article from your phone to a friend, or you’re playing a mobile game while waiting in line for a movie, when you accidentally touch an ad on your screen. You weren’t interested in the ad -- heck, you didn’t even have time to see what it was for -- but now you’re hitting the back button to get back to what you were doing. Not only do accidental clicks like these annoy users, but left unaddressed, they can drive down the value of ads. Over the last four years, we’ve introduced a series of protections across mobile web and mobile apps to prevent accidental clicks like these on ads. Today we are continuing this commitment to protecting users and advertisers by extending accidental click protections to native ad formats. Native ads were developed to help publishers and developers implement ads that complement the look and feel of their content. Since our teams started instituting various click protections, we’ve learned quite a bit along the