AdMob Ads not displaying

Question

I'm adding AdMob ads (say that five times fast) to my finished, published Android app. I added the code from the PDF included with AdMob, following their instructions to a tee. The test ads show up fine on my emulators and specified test devices. They just don't appear in the published marketplace app when you download and run it. I still get impressions on my AdMob page however. Any ideas?

Answer 1

Admob sometimes doesn't have ads to display. This is worse for some apps than others. There are a few things to do to help mitigate this problem:

1. Enable adsense ads - this gives a larger pool of ads
2. Ensure that you have house ads available for all of your apps in Admob. That way, if they can't find paying ads, they'll at least show your house ads. This will significantly raise your fill rate, but not directly raise your income (depends on what you do with the house ads).

Answer 2

I know that the admob code does not display anything until it connects to the server and receives an ad. In my app it can take several seconds for the ad to display, but not usually longer than that.

Answer 3

I notice this fairly often with admob on one of my apps, while another seems to serve up ads just fine. Can't figure it out either, but I suspect it has to do with AdMob not having any campaigns that tailor to your application description and keywords.

Answer 4

I'm seeing exactly the same behavior. Does your app perform any network tasks on startup? If so, here is a thread on admob's support group which might provide an explanation:

https://groups.google.com/d/topic/admob-publisher-discuss/hR7zs_GBSRw/discussion

Unfortunately for me delaying my app's network activity while waiting for admob isn't really an option, so I wish admob/google would release a fix.