Selling Your Own Ads in Your Mobile App
What is AdMob?
Admob is a mobile advertising platform founded by Omar Hamouri in 2006, offering advertising solution to Android, iOS, webOS, Flash Lite, Windows Phone 7 and all standard mobile web browser. Google has acquired Admob on November 2009 and today Admob is the world’s largest mobile advertising platform serving more than 700 billion worth of impression since its launch.
What is a Admob House Ad?
An Admob House Ad is your own advertisement that you could embed on your own app for free. It is a great avenue for you to generate extra revenue from your free app and also to encourage your users to upgrade to the paid app. Admob’s seamless UI also make the creation of your house ad a breeze. A house ad could be set within a couple of clicks and you can also easily setup targeting options like geographical location, demographic profile and devices version. This ensures that your advertisements reach to your intended audience.
A house ad is a great source of backlink for your website(if your app have one) as it will generate more traffic to your website and give more information to your audience where the mobile screen could not deliver.
If so happens that your app do not have a website, the house ad could double up as an advertisement medium where you could earn extra revenue from it. There are 2 options for it, look for a potential advertiser who is willing to pay to advertise on your app or simply use the generated advertisement from AdMob.
How do I sell my ad space
Say if you are looking to generate some advertising revenue from your mobile app. There are a couple of ways:
1. Use Ad Network (i.e AdMob)
Once you have embedded a AdMob SDK into your App, AdMob will automatically run whatever ads they have and share the revenue with you.
2. Sell your own ads
a. Sometimes for premium publishers, you might not want to run ads from anywhere because you might not know what ads will show up.
b. You might also want to position your ad space as premium in line with the content that your app is providing.
c. In this case, you can sell your own ads directly either through a sales person who already exist in your organisation and who 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 for your advertising rates.
e. You can even create a house ad to promote that you have space available for sale!
How do I add Admob House Ad into my App?
1) The very first step of building your House Ad is of course to have an account with Ad Mob, but not to worry, you could tie your Google account with Ad Mob so that you will not have to re-enter your credentials again. After having your account in place, the next important step is to place the downloaded AdMob SDK into your application to ensure that advertisements could be pushed in to your application successfully.
This is done in many ways and it differs according to the mobile OS you are building. Check out AdMob’s documentation here: http://code.google.com/mobile/ads/docs/
AdMob SDK and code being embedded in a iPhone App via XCode
2) The next step is to create the content of the advertisement where you could choose a text ad or a banner ad. Choose whichever deem correct to you and click Finish.
Choose the creative type for the house ad banner
3) Next, you will have to choose which platform you wish to publish your advertisement to. Additional options such as Target Country and Device Version is also available.
Targetting options for your house ads
4) The last step is to create an action when users click on your advertisement.
Defining the post tap action. Landing site or App download
This is usually either a App Download if you are promoting another mobile application or a URL to a website. We highly recommended that your URL is mobile optimized. Mobile users are picky and will not navigate the website if it is not mobile optimised.
In fact AdMob has found that campaigns with mobile optimised pages increased signifcantly the average length of visit.. 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 knowledge.
If you have a 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 in making a great ad.
5) Viola, you are done and the advertisement will be pushed to your application soon.
how it looks like on an app
Conclusion
Being an AdSense user for years, I definitely think it is worthy enough to call AdMob his little brother and I will believe that AdMob will continue to be the benchmark of mobile advertising platform for years to come. Other than the simple-to-use and intuitive 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.
