I have just added admob ads to my game and have a ton of questions about ads and best practises to maximise profits. I want to initially release on Google Play Store. My game is a classic brick breaker game like Breakout or Arkanoid with some twists. I'm not expecting thousands of downloads but I want to do this as good as possible.

1. So i just added Admob ads, but it's showing Clash of Clans each time I display an add. Is this because I just created the add and it needs to find advertisers? Or is Clash of Clans the highest bidder and this would probably result in no revenue at all since it's won't get clicked and shows the boring same ad each time?
   
2. Is AdMob the right a good choice? I want to display video ads in between X levels, I'm ok with good looking video ads that cannot be clicked away as long as they pay more.
   
3. AdMob offers mediation too so I registered at Leadbolt since I tried that one out a year ago. But now I have to enter an initial eCPM value, whats a good number here? How would I know? I have currently put $0.01 there but I am not seeing any leadbolt test ads.
   
4. Are there particularly good ad networks for games? I see that AdMob just displays clash of clans almost every time. I don't think this is going to be clicked much since it's already installed on a couple of million devices.
   
   Some more general questions
   
5. How often should I display ads? Most of my levels take within 1 to 2 minutes and I was thinking about showing an ad every 3 levels. But I'm sure there are some magic numbers for this.
   
6. This eCPM thing is estimated cost per thousand impressions right? But what does it refer to? I always though it meant if I would earn $4 per 1000 views I have a eCPM of $4. But ad sides let me fill in this number myself.
   
   So if I would put in $4,00 there I only get ads displayed that earn $4,00 per 1000 views on average between all users displaying this ad?
   
7. Should I enter into as much ad networks as possible and put them all in AdMob or another mediator?
   
8. What are ad campaigns and how to use them?
   
9. Any other tips, tricks and general knowledge would be very welcome.

Thanks,

So i just added Admob ads, but it's showing Clash of Clans each time I display an add. Is this because I just created the add and it needs to find advertisers? Or is Clash of Clans the highest bidder and this would probably result in no revenue at all since it's won't get clicked and shows the boring same ad each time?

Most likely: Admob knows your app is a game, and it's showing an ad that's targeted to the audience for your app.

Most likely: Admob knows your app is a game, and it's showing an ad that's targeted to the audience for your app.

Yeah but why is it only showing clash of clans? Is it the only ad currently available?

Yeah but why is it only showing clash of clans? Is it the only ad currently available?

I'm not prepared to guess how their algorithm works beyond what I've guessed to now.

So I have read a couple of more Chinese walls of text upon this subject that seems more vague to me then rocket science. I discovered Chartboost, first thing I see is there business is a couple of blocks away from where I live in Amsterdam so that made me smile.

• Reviews seemed good.
• Within 30 minutes everything was up and running.
• Love how the ads look.
• There analytics system is awesome.
• I can put my own frames around the ads to incorporate my style.

I still am wondering if I should go partly with the 50% Admob + 3th party networks and 50% Chartboost just to check what the differences are. I have read a lot about testing things out and experiment a lot. I'm just looking for as much information I can get to make the right choices. Currently every choice feels like a leap of fate. It took me 3 years to get to this point, well the game took me about a couple of hundred hours but I want to do this as good as possible.

Ads are super subjective and totally depend on how your game flow works. How one game shows ads might be totally inappropriate for your game. So you really aren't going to get one person telling you where to put ads. Honestly, you just have to A/B test the crap out of and find what works. Most of the decent ad networks have a crap ton of options to allow you to segregate users into cohorts for targeted advertising. Your game might have a bunch of potential trigger points put into it but a user might only see one or two depending on how you set things up.

It is also pretty common to have more then one ad network integrated into a game. You could even potentially A/B ad networks. Set the same triggers for both networks but only use one based on some kind of internal player ID. This kind of stuff is much easier to do on Android since there is only a couple of hours between the time you upload a new binary and it shows up in the store.

This isn't an easy thing to setup and takes a lot of trial and error to try and get right. There are companies that make a lot of money telling companies how to do this.