All You Need to Know about AdMob to Generate Revenue for Your Gaming App

AdMob, since Google bought it, has become the AdSense of mobile apps. Leveraging the power of the biggest data guzzling behemoth on the internet, AdMob offers one of the more streamlined revenue channels for the app developers.

However, app developers often do not equate AdMob with Google, and miss on some opportunities to increase revenues, and at times use it improperly — losing money and even getting banned. This post will discuss AdMob and how to use it in a way that is not only appreciated by its boss (Big G) but also by the app users.

Understanding AdMob’s Offerings

AdMob offers you the ability to integrate multiple ad types (interstitials, banners, and videos) and seamlessly integrate them into a holistic experience. However, depending on the type of app and user demographics it is targeting, you can choose individual types of ads. Available ads include the following:

Which ads (or combination thereof) are best suited for your app depends on how well you understand your target audience, and can easily be tweaked with further user feedback.

Better User Ratings for Better AdMob Revenues

Your AdMob revenue depends on your app’s ratings.

The higher and more positive the ratings, the higher the chances of people actually downloading the game, which in turn equals to more opportunities for pitching filtered ads, and hence greater eCPM.

A great way of increasing reviews is to employ multiple channels of review and feedback for the users. For example, you can categorize feedback according to level of user engagement:

Leverage Google Analytics — Loyalty and Recency Reports

Monetize your app by checking Google’s Loyalty and Recency reports.

The Loyalty Report you the number of session a user engage in your app e.g. the “1st interaction”, the “2nd interaction”, the “3rd interaction” and so on and so forth. It shows the point(s) where users tend to drop off. Let’s say the report shows that users that have a lower than 4 sessions of interaction have a reduced output, out can then easily see how to overcome that with tests.

The Recency Report, on the other hand, shows you the time variations between two sessions. This offers a method of segmenting your user base according to the frequency of engagement, enabling you to better target new customers that are similar to your most engaged segment. This also gives you the opportunity to retarget your ads properly, and try to target users with less user sessions.

In Conclusion — Never Play with AdMob

Never click on a live Admob ad on your own devices, even for the sake of testing. Google is thorough, and can easily detect fraudulent clicks (including even if the devices in question were on the same LAN). Google will detect it, and will ban you permanently.

Finally, avoid spamming your users with ads. It is only going to decrease their user experience and hence their level of engagement. A good method of doing that is to go for quality than quantity i.e. showing one interstitial ad per session would mean lower impressions but significantly higher RPM compared to spamming them with more adds to get higher impressions but very low RPM. The result might seem the same, except the first one will have more engaged users.

This blog post is based in the advice given by successful app entrepreneurs in the App Entrepreneurs and Marketers Group. Stay tuned for more informative and insightful posts from us!