Selling your own ads on your mobile app

What is AdMob?

Admob is a mobile advertising platform founded by Omar Hamouri in 2006, offering an advertising solution for Android, iOS, webOS, Flash Lite, Windows Phone 7 and all standard mobile web browsers. Google acquired Admob in November 2009, and today Admob is the world’s largest mobile advertising platform, delivering over 700 billion impressions since launch.

What is an Admob house ad?

An Admob House Ad is your own advertisement that you can embed in your own application by free. It is a great avenue for you to generate additional income with your free app and also to encourage your users to upgrade to the paid app. Admob’s seamless user interface also makes creating your house ad a breeze. A house ad can be set up with a couple of clicks and you can also easily set targeting options like geo location, demographic profile and device version. This ensures that your ads reach your target audience.

A house ad is a great source of a backlink for your website (if your app has one) as it will drive more traffic to your website and provide more information to your audience where mobile display could not deliver.

If it happens that your application does not have a website, the house ad could work as an advertising medium where you could earn additional income. There are 2 options for this, find a potential advertiser who is willing to pay to advertise on your app or just use AdMob generated ad.

How do I sell my ad space?

Say if you are looking to generate some ad revenue from your mobile app. There are a couple of ways:

1. Use the ad network (ie AdMob)

Once you’ve integrated an AdMob SDK into your app, AdMob will automatically run any ads you have and share the revenue with you.

2. Sell your own ads

has. Sometimes for premium publishers you may not want to serve ads from anywhere because you may not know which ads will be displayed.

b. You may also want to position your ad space as premium in line with the content your app provides.

con In this case, you can sell your own ads directly through a seller that already exists in your organization and is probably already selling ads for your website.

d. You can also list on your website that you are open to having advertisers for your app and people can contact you about your ad rates.

me. You can even create a house ad to promote that you have space available for sale!

How do I add Admob House Ad in my app?

1) The first step in creating your house ad is of course having an Ad Mob account, but don’t worry, you can link your Google account with Ad Mob so you don’t have to re-enter your credentials. After you have your account in place, the next important step is to put the downloaded AdMob SDK into your app to ensure that ads can be successfully delivered to your app.

This is done in many ways and differs depending on the mobile operating system you are building. See the AdMob documentation here: http://code.google.com/mobile/ads/docs/

AdMob SDK and code integrated into an iPhone app via XCode

2) The next step is to create the ad content where you can choose a text ad or a banner ad. Choose what you think is right for you and click Finish.

Choose the creative type for the house ad banner

3) Next, you will need to choose which platform you want to post your ad on. Additional options such as destination country and device version are also available.

Targeting options for your house ads

4) The last step is to create an action when users click on your ad.

Definition of the post-touch action. Destination site or app download

This is typically an app download if you’re promoting another mobile app, or a URL to a website. We strongly recommend that your URL be optimized for mobile devices. Mobile users are picky and will not browse your website if it is not optimized for mobile devices.

In fact, AdMob found that campaigns with mobile-optimized pages significantly increased average visit length. Designers use a visual drag-and-drop interface to design the microsite, allowing them to design a mobile microsite up to 5 times faster and with no development skills.

If you have great creative, you can even charge more for your ads because users who see the ads are more engaged and advertisers are willing to pay for the extra effort to make a great ad.

5) Viola, you are done and the ad will be sent to your app soon.

what it looks like in an app

conclusion

Being an AdSense user for years, I definitely think it’s worthy enough to call AdMob its little brother and I think AdMob will continue to be the benchmark mobile advertising platform for years to come. Apart from the intuitive and easy to use interface that attracted me, the clear and concise reporting system is also a plus point for AdMob. The verdict for AdMob is simple, give it a try.