ANDREW BRAGGINS: Hey, everybody, and welcome back
to the Mobile Ads Garage.
I'm Andrew Braggins, and with the help
of my partner, Gary the graphics guy,
today we're going to talk about AdMob mediation.
We'll cover how it works, what the pros and cons are, and then
have screencasts of iOS and Android
of sample implementations.
All right, Gary, let's get straight into my app
so we can talk.
When you request an ad from AdMob like this banner,
a whole bunch of advertisers compete in an auction
to see who's willing to pay you the most to display their ad.
When the auction is done, the winning ad
is sent down to the device for display.
This competition between advertisers
is one of the ways AdMob helps you maximize your revenue.
Now, mediation is a way to have competition,
not only between different advertisers,
but between entire ad networks.
When you make a request for a mediated ad unit,
the server returns a mediation configuration, or stack.
It's a list of which networks to request an ad from,
ordered by which one's likely to make you
the most money at that moment.
The SDK looks at that list and starts
trying networks one at a time, and the first one
to return an ad wins.
This is where AdMob adapters come in.
The mobile ad's SDK uses them to rap
other networks' SDKs so they all have a common interface.
The beauty of it is that all of this
happens automatically under the hood.
As long as you make sure the other SDKs and their adaptors
are built into your app, there's usually
no other mobile work required.
So the plus side is that you have
more networks of advertisers competing
for your impressions, which can mean better fill rates and more
revenue.
The downside, though, is that it can take longer to load an ad,
and because you need those other networks' SDKs
and adapters built in, your app size
is bigger than it would be with just AdMob.
Also, because you're now dealing with multiple networks,
you have to register with them, create ad units
in their network, and so on.
How those pros and cons weigh out is up to you.
A lot of smaller publishers prefer the simplicity
of using AdMob alone, while, for others, the chance
to increase revenue makes the extra work worthwhile.
All right, time to get our hands dirty.
Let's take a look at how you can use
the AdMob console to configure an ad
unit to use multiple networks.
It's the first step toward getting that mediation money.
Is that Peruvian money?
Why did you go to Peru?
All right, then.
OK, so if you've created an ad unit before,
you're probably familiar with this screen.
This is the page that lists all the ad
units associated with an app, in this case, my test app.
I want to draw your attention to the mediation column
here, though.
You can see I only have one ad source competing for this unit,
and I'd like to add another one.
So I'll click this link and I get
a view of the ad networks assigned to the unit.
And I can click the New Ad Network button
and choose a mediated network to add to my own unit,
and you can see there's a bunch.
For this video, I've actually created a fake ad network
with an SDK and everything.
It's called the Sample network.
It's just for this recording, so you're not
going to see it here when you set up your own ad units,
but you're going to want real ads from a real network
anyway, because they result in a real check.
And you can see I put in an ad unit here.
Because AdMob uses the same SDK that you would normally,
you do need to have an ad unit for each mediated network.
Right, so now I've got two ad sources
competing for my impressions, which is great.
One thing I also want to mention is how they get ordered.
So I can come in here and set a hard estimate on the CPM
for what I think that network is earning me,
and AdMob will use that when deciding
which network gets first try.
AdMob also features something called automatic network
optimization, which can order the networks for you
based on how much money they're making.
The server knows how much you're getting
for AdMob ads, of course, and for many other networks,
if you allow it access to your account,
it can actually pull reporting data
and then put it to use in determining
which source should go first.
Just make sure you're using optimization anywhere
you see it offered.
All right.
Once you've got an ad unit configured,
the next step is to get the project building
with the mediated SDK and its adapter.
Let's take a look at how that works with iOS.
First I'll import the mediated SDK and its adapter
into my project.
Then I just need to rebuild my app and profit.
OK, that's money from a board game.
You're an odd person.
OK, here are my steps, and I'm actually
going to do the first two at once.
Here's my app, and this is the project
that I need to get that SDK and adapter into.
So I'll turn to the AdMob mediation networks page.
There will be a link for this at the end of the video
so you can find it easily.
It's a great resource for anybody using mediation.
It lists all our mediation partners
plus links to their SDKs, adapters, and instructions,
so you can find out the exact steps for each network.
Some networks, for example, may have
CocoaPods that you can just add to your pod file
and import that way, just like you see me doing here.
But my simple network just uses a static lib,
so I'm going to grab the files and drop them into a group.
Again, every network has their own particular instructions,
so make sure you check them to see if they require linker
flags like the Objective-C flag for categories
or any other additional steps.
All right, so that's it, that's all for the importing.
Time to rebuild my app.
And there's my mediated ad.
Thank you, Gary, but that's actually kind of the point.
You'll notice I didn't have to change
any of my actual mobile code.
Referencing the GADBannerView, loading the request,
none of that changed, and yet AdMob
was able to fetch the configuration from the server,
then call into the adapter, which
called into the sample SDK, and then came back with an ad.
Pretty cool, and the only step left is profit.
All right, so that's iOS.
Now let's try Android.
As you can see, it's the same steps.
Import, rebuild, profit.
Gary, those are skeeball tokens.
OK, so here are the four steps again,
and we're going to start with importing the mediated SDK.
Here's my project that I'll be importing that SDK into,
and the first question is, where do I get the SDK?
A great resource, again, is our mediation networks page.
There will be a link at the end of the video.
This page lists all of our mediation partners
and has links to their SDKs, adapters, and instructions.
The instructions part is important
because different networks distribute their SDKs
and adapters in different ways.
Some might host them on JCenter, for example,
and I could come right into my build.gradle file
and just add a dependency for them and their adapters.
Some networks also bundle the adapter into the SDK.
So there'd only be one artifact to import here.
The most common setup, though, is just
JAR files, which is how my sample network does it.
So I'm going to cut these back out.
So I'll drag and drop the JAR into my project
here and get it done that way.
There's the SDK.
All right, so that was the JAR for the SDK.
Now I just need the adapter, which goes in the same way.
There we go.
All right, so now I've got the mediated SDK and its adapter
imported into the project.
Time to rebuild my app.
And there's my mediated ad.
The AdMob SDK gets the configuration from the server,
goes through the adapter to the mediated SDK,
and comes back with an ad.
The only thing left is profit.
So that's AdMob mediation.
It's a little more work, but it's also more competition
for your impressions, meaning more potential profit.
Again, we use banners here just to keep things simple,
but you can do other formats like interstitials and rewarded
video as well.
To help you along the way, here's
a link to our mediation networks page,
which has a list of all our mediation
partners plus links to their SDKs, adapters,
and instructions.
We've also got implementation guides for iOS and Android.
So check those out, and as always,
you're welcome to bring your technical questions
to our support forum.
And if you've got a question about this video or an idea
for something we should cover, leave a comment below,
and Gary and I will see you next time.
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