Our new iPhone ad units have gone live and advertisers are already taking advantage of the enhanced user engagement and reach of these units throughout our iPhone network.

Our new ad units include:

• Mobile Social Networking – Connect consumers with your social content on popular networks, including their Twitter feed, Facebook page, Digg, MySpace account, Flickr photos, and Linkedin with the new Mobile Social Networking ad unit.
• Search – Easily enable searching of your mobile site by allowing users to type a query directly into an ad unit.
• Multi-Panel Banner – Deliver compelling motion and interaction with multiple calls to action in a single rich media ad unit.
• Scrolling Canvas – Provide instant access to more in-depth information without requiring users to click away from a site or application with a dynamic, scrolling ad unit.

The search ad unit allows users to input search terms within the ad itself, delivering them to the most relevant part of your mobile site for their interests.

These innovative ad units are relevant for brands from a range of verticals.  Contact us at trymobile@admob.com to learn more about incorporating some or all of these ad units into your next buy with us.

Johanna W.
Product Marketing

Since we announced last week that we can no longer support mediation layers such as AdWhirl or Tapjoy, we have been actively talking with application developers in our network. They asked for more time, so we extended the date for serving ad requests through these companies to August 5. But the most frequent ask was for AdMob to support the serving of house ads, so we promised to evaluate how we could do this and get back to everyone with more details within a few days.

Our product and engineering teams are still working out the details, but in early August we plan to give application developers the ability to reserve a percentage of their inventory to serve house ads that are created, hosted, and served via the AdMob platform. Publishers will be able to use these ads only to cross-promote their sites or applications and would earn no revenue from AdMob for the impressions or clicks on these ads. By supporting house ads we are helping to give app devs the flexibility they told us they want while still maximizing the monetization of their applications.

AdMob’s biggest priority is to deliver the best possible results for our developers and advertisers, as well as a great experience for end users. We believe that by helping to ensure users have a good experience with the ads they view, we are helping the mobile app ecosystem thrive and thereby maximizing long-term revenue opportunities for our publishers.

We believe that application developers can make more money by monetizing their applications with AdMob than with any other player in the market. We continue to work hard every day to maximize monetization, as evidenced by the new version of our SDK we recently released that includes richer media ad formats which will help increase eCPMs. We are working on several other projects on this front which you can expect to hear about in the coming months.

If you have questions about house ads or AdMob’s change in policy regarding mediation layers please contact us directly at appdevfeedback@admob.com.

Ali
VP of Product Management

We have heard from a number of our developers on AdMob’s decision to no longer serve ads requested from iPhone apps that employ ad network mediation layers. Some of this feedback has been positive, but we have also heard concerns about the impact of this change. We have listened to the concerns of developers and decided to implement two changes to our new policy. These two changes address the primary issues developers raised to us.

First, we have decided to extend the date for serving ad requests to August 5. This will give application developers more time to implement the necessary code changes and for their applications to make it through the Apple App Store approval process.

Second, we are evaluating how we can give application developers the ability to reserve a percentage of their traffic to serve house ads and will share details with our developers in the next few days.

Our top priority in everything we do is to always deliver the best possible results for our developers and advertisers, as well as a great experience for the end users who view ads served by AdMob. We did not make the decision to end support for mediation layers lightly and do feel that it was the right decision. In the long run we believe by helping to ensure users have a good experience with ads, that we are helping the mobile app ecosystem thrive and thereby maximizing long-term revenue opportunities for our publishers.

We work hard on behalf of our publishers every day to help them maximize revenue. To that end, we recently released a new version of our SDK that includes richer media ad formats that will help increase eCPMs. You can expect hear more from us here in the coming months as well.

If you have questions or concerns about this change in AdMob’s policy please contact us directly at appdevfeedback@admob.com.

Ali
VP of Product Management

Beginning July 22, AdMob will no longer serve ads requested from iPhone apps that employ ad network mediation layers such as AdWhirl or Tapjoy. This change will enable us to provide our publishers and advertisers, as well as end users, with the best possible experience and results.

Over the past few months, we have discovered that iPhone apps that use a mediation layer generate a substantially higher volume of complaints from end users and higher number of technical issues than apps that integrate with AdMob directly. These user complaints and issues range from ads not rendering properly to ads clicking to nowhere to ads taking a very long time to load.  Regardless of the type of issue, all damage the end user experience of both the ad itself and the app within which the ad is displayed.

What we have also found over the last few months is that mediation layers significantly impair AdMob’s ability to optimize the selection of ads for the apps that choose to use them, by obstructing our view of these applications’ traffic profiles. These traffic profiles are a key input parameter that we use at AdMob to select the right ad for the right app at the right time.  By working directly with the publisher, AdMob is able to generate a much more accurate profile of the traffic, in terms of both volume and timing, generated by a specific iPhone app, which will enable us to optimize the revenue potential that we can deliver for the app.

At AdMob, we understand that iPhone app developers need to maximize the revenue potential of their apps, even if it means they use multiple ad networks.  To that end, some of our publishers have developed their own logic to allow the use of multiple networks and maximize fill rates, which we will continue to support.

We believe we can best help publishers maximize the revenue potential of their apps by working with them directly.  AdMob is the leader in monetizing iPhone applications with advertising, and we have gained that position by developing sophisticated and highly scalable technologies that enable us to interpret millions of different pieces of information across our network to select the best possible ad for any given ad request.  The proof is in what we deliver for our publishers, with greater than 90 percent average fill rates and industry-leading eCPM levels across all categories of iPhone app inventory.  And we intend to continue to lead the industry by working as closely as possible with our app developer customers.

Ali
VP of Product Management

In partnership with comScore, we regularly conduct survey research on our network to determine the audience composition of our partner sites and apps.  We use this information to create demographic bundles to deliver unparalleled targeting and performance for the campaigns our advertising partners run on AdMob’s network.

This original research also allows us to look more deeply at our large network and gain insights into the demographic characteristics of users of devices such as the iPhone and iPod touch.  We are excited to be the first to collect and share this comparative data.  When we started the research, we hypothesized that iPod touch users were younger on average than iPhone users and this hypothesis was supported by the results.

iPOD TOUCH USERS ARE YOUNGER THAN iPHONE USERS
•    69% of iPod touch users are between 13-24 years of age, while this same segment represents just 26% of iPhone users.
•    74% of iPhone users are over the age of 25, compared to 31% of iPod touch users.

iPHONE USERS HAVE HIGHER INCOME LEVELS & ARE MORE LIKELY TO HAVE KIDS; BOTH DEVICES SKEW MALE
•    In line with the older demographic composition of iPhone users, they also have higher incomes.  78% of iPhone users have an annual income of at least $25,000, compared to only 66% of iPhone touch users.
•    iPhone users are more likely to have children than iPod touch users, most probably due to the age difference in the two groups.  46% of iPhone users have children, compared to only 28% percent of iPod touch users.
•    More than 70% of users on both the iPhone and iPod touch are male.

MEDIA CONSUMPTION: PREFERENCE FOR THE MOBILE WEB OVER OTHER MEDIA
•    5 in 10 consumers on both iPhone and iPod touch devices use the mobile Web more frequently than they read printed newspapers.
•    More than 40% of users of both devices reported using the Internet on their mobile device more often than using the Web from their computers or listening to the radio.

What does this research mean for advertisers?  Advertisers looking to reach a younger demographic can take advantage of AdMob’s reach on the iPod touch and advertisers looking to reach a high net worth adult audience can reach this demographic in AdMob’s iPhone network.  It’s important to partner with a mobile advertising network that offers scale in both of these devices and can target them separately to improve relevance for users and performance for advertisers.

Johanna W.
Marketing