Unofficial Google Products Help Centre

It has been a busy time here in Mountain View as more than 7,000 developers joined us at Shoreline Amphitheater for this year’s Google I/O. We made a number of big product announcements but I can’t help being most excited about one in particular — the newly redesigned AdMob ! Many of you rely on in-app ads for revenue — in fact, over 1 million apps now use AdMob to earn across iOS and Android. And to date, we’ve paid out over $3.5 billion dollars to developers like you. But we knew we could be doing even more to help you be successful. So we rebuilt the AdMob platform from the ground up to help you build a profitable business faster and to stay profitable as you scale. Simple to use with a brand new user interface Your time is valuable and we want you to spend it growing your business, not navigating our screens. With the new AdMob, everything from navigation to dashboards has been organized around your apps. The tools and features you need most are right at your fingertips. We’ve als...

All views expressed in this blog post are solely those of the author, and not that of Google. This guest post is from Sreeraman Thiagarajan, a Google Developers Expert in the app marketing and monetization space and a published author on the Economic Times . Sreeraman is featured as our guest blogger to share insights and tips from his experience to help AdMob developers grow their earnings. If you’re new to AdMob, be sure to sign up here . In the introductory post we saw how AdMob lets app developers take control of monetizing their apps - here’s the second part on optimization and measuring. Optimizing revenue and volume: A counter question I often get goes like this “But other networks offer better eCPM (more dollar for every one thousand impressions served), why must I choose AdMob?” Answer for this lies in understanding two metrics and the two respective fundamentals behind each of these metrics. The first metric is ‘fill rate’ which means how many relevant ads can the a...

All views expressed in this blog post are solely those of the author, and not Google. This guest post is from Sreeraman Thiagarajan, a Google Developers Expert in the app marketing and monetization space and a published author on the Economic Times . Sreeraman is featured as our guest blogger to share insights and tips from his experience to help AdMob developers grow their earnings. If you’re new to AdMob, be sure to sign up here . There’s never been a better time to be an app developer in India. According to reports referenced in the Economic Times, app downloads on Google Play from India grew from 3.5 billion downloads in 2015 to 6.2 billion downloads in 2016 1 . Based on this report, India now holds the top spot in the world for apps downloaded on Google Play, even outranking the US and Brazil. As noted in a recent article by Quartz India, nearly 90% of India’s over 220 million smartphone users have Android smartphones, so the ~6 billion app download figures comes as no surprise...

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...

A clear trend is emerging in the world of smartphones – people want free apps. According to a study by Juniper Research, barely 1% of apps are now paid for at the point of download. 1 While demand for free apps continues to increase, app developers are answering a very important question, “what’s the best way to publish my app for free while sustainably funding my business?” In-app ads are a reliable solution that is set to grow 3.2X between 2014-18. 2 Many of the world’s most popular apps rely heavily on in-app advertising to earn income. Apps like PicsArts and Trivia Crack each have hundreds of millions of downloads and use advertising as a revenue source. In-app ads are evolving and there are many options for developers to utilize which provide great experiences for users. So, how do you get started with ads? To answer this, we’re launching a new ebook called “The No-Nonsense Guide to In-App Ads”, the latest in our No-nonsense series . This guide is designed to provide a comprehen...

Cross-posted from the Inside AdWords blog . We’re launching two new immersive ad formats to help advertisers drive app installs. As an AdMob developer you may start to see these new formats appear in your apps. If you opt into ‘Image’ as an ‘ad type’ in your account, you’ll be eligible to show the Interactive Interstitial format, and if you opt into ‘Text,’ your app can begin to serve the Trial Run format. At this time, Interactive Interstitials show on Android and iOS apps, and Trial Run Ads show on Android apps only. Developers are constantly looking for new ways to bring users to their apps. But because people’s attention on mobile is becoming shorter and more intent-rich, finding engaged users of your app is an ongoing challenge — both before and after an install. In fact, we found that one in four installed apps is never even used. We’ve focused our efforts on offering developers advertising tools that engage users and showcase an app at its best. We recently redesigned one...

Predictions estimate that by 2017, 94.5% of app downloads will be free [1] . As a developer, you are probably juggling creating great content for your game and finding ways to monetize it. It’s important to develop a robust monetization model that takes into consideration the spending preferences of all users. That’s why today we are unveiling a new white paper with insights and ideas on building effective monetization models: A Winning Combination - How using in-app purchases and ads together can maximize mobile game revenue . Today, in-app ads and freemium (free download with IAPs*) fuel the growth of mobile app revenue, growing at 71% and 72% respectively from 2013 to 2014 [2] . Through an analysis of over 10,000 top Android apps, we found that for games, using IAP and ads together can potentially generate 117% more revenue than just IAPs alone. However, a hybrid approach is more than simply bundling ads and IAPs together; it’s about targeting the right users at the right time wit...

Nearly 60% of smartphone users expect their favorite apps to look visually appealing. We’ve always believed that in-app ads can enhance an app’s overall experience by being well designed. So today we’re announcing a completely new look for our interstitial in-app ad formats - also known as full-screen ads - that run on apps in the AdMob network and DoubleClick Ad Exchange. Inspired by Material Design , the new app install interstitial comes with a beautiful cover photo, a round install button, and matching color schemes. Technology called “color extraction” makes the ads more consistent with the brand's look and feel -- we extract a dominant color either from the cover photo or app icon and apply it to the footer and install button. We found that having a greater variety of designs and colors can improve conversion rate. Other features include the app’s rating, and a screenshot gallery which appears when a user taps ‘More images’, so users can learn more about the app without leavi...