Everything you need to know about Google AdMob

Deepdive with good stuff!

Hello and welcome to part 2 in this 5-part series on getting started with mobile ad revenue. Since you’ve graduated from the 101 class, we’re now going to dive into more practical advice on how to read, optimize, and set ad revenue data in Admob mediation. After Admob, I’ll also do deep dives into Unity LevelPlay and Applovin MAX. Let’s dive into it!

First and foremost here are the pros and cons of Admob Mediation:

Pros:

• Super strong performance on Banners

• Very good ad quality for end cards and creative length

• Good Account management (Low thresholds to begin talking to a human)

Cons:

• Reporting: key ad monetization metrics are harder to extract compared to other platforms

• Video performance is sometimes higher on other platforms

• Dashboard can be clunky to use and set up (there are roomers for this being addressed soon)

Basics

Main Dashboard

Once your account has been approved you will get access to the Admob dashboard. This is where you will spend the majority of your time. On the home page, you can see a good overview of key metrics like revenue, requests, impressions, match rate, and eCPM. The good news here is that you can set it to track a previous period so you can see if your metrics are trending up or down. 

From the main dashboard, you can access all the main parts of Admob that you will need to control and optimize your ad revenue. I’ve highlighted the most important tabs that we will explore in depth now.

Setting up an App

To start you need to set up the mobile app that you wish to monetize. To do this you need to go: to “Main Menu → Apps → Add App” then follow the steps as shown here.

Once you’ve set up your apps you’ll be able to see them inside the “Apps tab” from the main menu. Once you’ve set up your app you need to go to Apps→ ad units→ Create ad unit

After you’ve created your ad units send their codes to your developer as they will need to input your ad units for impressions. 

Setting up a Mediation Group

Now you’ll need to set up a mediation group. This is where you can optimize your ad inventory based on geolocation and utilizing other networks. This is important so pay attention. 

Main Menu → Mediation → Create Mediation Group 

When starting all you need to do is set up a global mediation group. Once you get considerable scale in certain geos then you can break this out even further and have different mediation groups for different goes. In the start, it’s important to keep it simple until you have enough scale and data to go more granular.

Come up with a descriptive name so you don’t get confused. I usually go with “Global Banner DRD” or “Global Rewarded iOS” (you get the idea). After you’ve christened your mediation group you need to click Ad units and add the same ad unit that you created above. This ties all impressions from that ad unit into this mediation group. After clicking save you will be able to see your new mediation group from the Mediation tab. 

Setting Up Networks

Now you’ll need to choose what networks to set up and integrate. In Admob, I would recommend these networks to get started. Once you reach $500-1k/day you will need more.  

Banners:

• Meta (only good for Android)

• Mintegral

• Unity 

• Liftoff

Video:

• Applovin

• Unity

• Mintegral

Note here that the recommendations above quickly can become outdated. I’d recommend always check the AppsFlyer index for the top-performing networks for your geos and cross-checking that they’re available on admob as a partner network. 

To set up networks you will need your developer to integrate the SDK (with an app update) and then you will need to setup the network inside of your mediation group. 

Mediation → Click your new mediation group → Bidding add ad source / Waterfall add ad source

Here you need to add all the details from the 3rd party networks to setup. Then you need to press the big blue save button. Congratulations now you’ve set up your mediation group. 

Reading Data

To read and look at data in Admob two tabs will become your best friend; Mediation & User activity. Let’s start with the mediation tab:

Main Menu → Reports → Mediation 

This dashboard you should be checking every day to make sure that all ad network setups are running correctly. Here are some things that you should be checking:

• Trendline of impressions - is anything above or below the normal threshold. If something spikes or tanks you need to figure out why.

• eCPM - is eCPM within your normal thresholds. If one network is higher than the other email them and find out how you can work better

• Revenue by network - check every 30 days what the revenue percentage is of your various networks. If one is increasing or decreasing message them to find out why

If you were paying attention to the last intro course to ad monetization you’ll see that nothing in this dashboard is showing ADARPDAU which is the most important metric to look at. For that, you need to go to the user activity tab. 

Main Menu → Reports → User Activity Report

What to look at here:

• Active Users (AU) & Ad Viewers - This is your ad viewer rate. You can also access this as a % by toggling “Ad viewer rate” on metrics below. This shows what percentage of users are interacting with your ads. 

• Overall Earnings & Overall ARPU - This is your overall ADARPDAU that you should check whenever you make major updates to your demand sources or adding new placements. 

• IMPs/AV - Shows your impressions per Ad Viewers so how many impressions the users who see ads actually see. 

For benchmark metrics see the 101 course.

The most frustrating thing currently in Admob is that you can’t break any metrics down further if you select a format. This means that it’s a bit time-consuming to get Ad viewer %, ADARPDAU, and IMP/DAU for Banners, Interstitials, and Rewarded ads alone. Hope you fix this Google!

Optimizing

Once you’re set up on multiple networks, you’ll need to access the mediation report tab and split up the data into useful components by App and ad type. Start by selecting, for example:

App → Select one Android App → Last 7 days → Dimensions → Ad Source Instance

Once you have the data set up like this, click the three dots in the top right corner to download it as a CSV and open it in an Excel spreadsheet. To read the data accurately, you’ll need to create two new columns to see the percentage revenue per instance and fill rate per instance. 

In excel sheet:

1. Next to the revenue column (Column C), you’ll need to create a new column and work out the percentage earnings per instance as a percentage of all earnings. 

2. Next to the Impressions column, you’ll need to make a new column where you divide impressions by requests which will give you fill rate per instance.

Now, you have useful data that you can use to make optimization decisions! You can start looking at the data. What you’re looking for is instances with fill rates over 1%. If a network is filling at 1% or above, that means you can build out higher with that network. 

Let’s say a Unity $1.5 banner placement is filling at 1.5%. This means that the network is willing to pay a higher eCPM price for your inventory.  This means you can increase that placement to $1.7 or $1.8 as that network is willing to pay more. This means you need to go inside of the ad network dashboard, make that placement, and add it to your mediation group. If the same $1.5 placement was filling at less than 0.5% then consider moving it down to $1.1 till you find closer to a fill rate between 0.5-1%. 

Your aim in calculating the SoR per instance and Fill rate per instance is to use this data to find pockets of revenue in the networks on instances to optimize towards. If you don’t have the right placements then you’re losing out on revenue. These levels tend also to shift seasonally so you need to do this regularly. 

As you can see this is very time-consuming. The good news is that most of the networks on Admob are slowly moving to being header bidding only meaning that you don’t need to optimize the waterfall to get the highest revenues. 

Now this was everything you need to get the basics of how to set up, read, and optimize data in Admob mediation. For more complex and regular Ad Monetization updates please subscribe to my substack.