AdMob Mobile Ads performance

Understanding the Lifetime Value (LTV) of your users is critical to your business. Linking your AdMob and Firebase apps automatically incorporates AdMob revenue and revenue from networks that participate in Open Bidding with AdMob into Firebase metrics such as ARPU (average revenue per user) and LTV. These metrics help build comprehensive reporting on the value of your users and on segments that include both purchase revenue and ad revenue.

When your app is linked to AdMob, the Mobile Ads SDK automatically logs ad impressions and interactions. Based on these events, Google Analytics produces an Ads Performance report for you in the ad_click and ad_impression event reports. The Ads Performance metrics are Impressions, Clicks, Ad Exposure, and Estimated Revenue. They can be broken down by Ad Unit, Screen, Ad Format, and Ad Source. Additionally, you can filter this report by Audiences and User Properties to gain deeper insights into the performance of your ads among the various segments of your user base.

In this article:

• Prerequisites
• Verification
• Event metrics
• Primary dimensions
• Filtering
• Data consistency with AdMob

Prerequisites

In order to incorporate AdMob data into Firebase, ensure that you meet the following requirements:

• Add the required SDKs to your app
  • iOS
    • Google Mobile Ads SDK: pod 'Google-Mobile-Ads-SDK' (or GoogleMobileAds.framework)
    • Google Analytics for Firebase SDK: pod 'Firebase/Analytics' (or FirebaseAnalytics.framework)
  • Android
    • Google Mobile Ads SDK: play-services-ads v19.0.0+
    • Google Analytics for Firebase SDK: firebase-analytics v17.2.3+
• Link your AdMob app to a Firebase app
  Note: For Firebase to receive AdMob data, the AdMob account administrator must also be a project Owner for the related Firebase project.

Verification

In order to verify that the integration is working properly, you can use the DebugView in the Firebase console to confirm that your app is sending ad_click and ad_impression events.

After configuring DebugView, trigger an ad_impression event by loading and viewing an ad in your app. If you see a corresponding event in DebugView, the integration is working properly.

Event metrics

In addition to the general set of metrics that all event reports offer, the ad_click and ad_impression event reports offer the following additional metrics related to ads performance in your app:

• Impressions: number of ad impressions served
• Ad Exposure: amount of time the user was exposed to ads
• Clicks: number of ad clicks
• Estimated Revenue: estimated AdMob earnings

Primary dimensions

The ad performance metrics can be broken down by one of four primary dimensions:

• Ad Unit: ad unit name, as defined in AdMob
• Screen: screen class (automatically tracked by the Analytics SDK) or screen name (manually tracked using the Analytics SDK)
• Ad Format: format of the ad unit (for example, Banner, Interstitial, Rewarded, or Native)
• Ad Source: name of network that served the impression (for example, AdMob), including mediated networks

The notable exceptions are Impressions (which cannot be broken down by Screen) and Ad Exposure (which cannot be broken down by Ad Format and Ad Source).

Filtering

In addition to the general set of available User Property and Audience filters, the ad_click and ad_impression event reports offer a Screen filter, which lets you filter all metrics in those reports by screen.

Data consistency with AdMob

Although AdMob is the direct source of the ads-performance and revenue metrics shown in Analytics, there may still be discrepancies between the ad-performance metrics shown in Analytics and those shown in AdMob. These discrepancies arise from a number of known causes:

• Users running previous versions of your app: If versions of your app are in circulation that use AdMob but do not use Analytics (or if you’re using versions of the Mobile Ads or Analytics SDKs that predate the integration between the two products), then AdMob is aware of some impressions, clicks, and revenue that are unknown to Analytics.
• Analytics collection is disabled: If you disable analytics collection either temporarily or permanently, it results in missing ads events and revenue in Analytics reports.
• Difference in reporting time zone: If your reporting time-zone setting for AdMob is not aligned with the reporting time-zone setting for Analytics, then metrics for particular calendar days will not match. You should ensure that your AdMob time-zone settings ( (in the top right corner)  Account Settings ‘Time Zone and Currency’ section) align with your Firebase app’s time-zone setting (Project settings General Time zone) for maximum reporting consistency. Your AdMob time-zone setting can be updated through the AdSense interface. Learn more
• Differences in data collection and processing: Analytics data is collected and processed at slightly different times and using a different strategy than AdMob. To the extent that this data is collected or processed at different times by each system, your metrics may differ. A small source of such discrepancies could also be flaky hardware or long network outages on the mobile devices.