Get started

AdMob Mediation is a feature lets you serve ads to your apps from multiple sources, including the AdMob Network and third-party ad sources, in one place. AdMob Mediation helps maximize your fill rate and increase your monetization by sending ad requests to multiple networks to verify you find the best available network to serve ads. Case study.

Prerequisites

Before you can integrate mediation for an ad format, you need to integrate that ad format into your app:

New to mediation? Read Overview of AdMob Mediation.

Initialize Next Gen Mobile Ads SDK

The quick start guide shows you how to initialize the Next Gen Mobile Ads SDK. During that initialization call, mediation adapters also get initialized. It is important to wait for initialization to complete before you load ads in order to verify full participation from every ad network on the first ad request.

The following sample code shows how you can check each adapter's initialization status prior to making an ad request.

Kotlin

import com.google.android.libraries.ads.mobile.sdk.MobileAds
import com.google.android.libraries.ads.mobile.sdk.initialization.InitializationConfig
import kotlinx.coroutines.CoroutineScope
import kotlinx.coroutines.Dispatchers
import kotlinx.coroutines.launch

class MainActivity : AppCompatActivity() {
  override fun onCreate(savedInstanceState: Bundle?) {
    super.onCreate(savedInstanceState)
    setContentView(R.layout.activity_main)

    val backgroundScope = CoroutineScope(Dispatchers.IO)
    backgroundScope.launch {
      // Initialize Next Gen Mobile Ads SDK on a background thread.
      MobileAds.initialize(this@MainActivity, InitializationConfig.Builder("SAMPLE_APP_ID").build()) {
        initializationStatus ->
        for ((adapterName, adapterStatus) in initializationStatus.adapterStatusMap) {
          Log.d(
            "MyApp",
            String.format(
              "Adapter name: %s, Status code: %s, Status string: %s, Latency: %d",
              adapterName,
              adapterStatus.initializationState,
              adapterStatus.description,
              adapterStatus.latency,
            ),
          )
        }
        // Adapter initialization is complete.
      }
      // Other methods on MobileAds can now be called.
    }
  }
}

Java

import com.google.android.libraries.ads.mobile.sdk.MobileAds;
import com.google.android.libraries.ads.mobile.sdk.initialization.AdapterStatus;
import com.google.android.libraries.ads.mobile.sdk.initialization.InitializationConfig;

public class MainActivity extends AppCompatActivity {
  protected void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
    super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
    setContentView(R.layout.activity_main);

    new Thread(
            () -> {
              // Initialize Next Gen Mobile Ads SDK on a background thread.
              MobileAds.initialize(
                  this,
                  new InitializationConfig.Builder("SAMPLE_APP_ID")
                      .build(),
                  initializationStatus -> {
                    Map<String, AdapterStatus> adapterStatusMap =
                        initializationStatus.getAdapterStatusMap();
                    for (String adapterClass : adapterStatusMap.keySet()) {
                      AdapterStatus adapterStatus = adapterStatusMap.get(adapterClass);
                      Log.d(
                          "MyApp",
                          String.format(
                              "Adapter name: %s, Status code: %s, Status description: %s,"
                                  + " Latency: %d",
                              adapterClass,
                              adapterStatus.getInitializationState(),
                              adapterStatus.getDescription(),
                              adapterStatus.getLatency()));
                    }
                    // Adapter initialization is complete.
                  });
              // Other methods on MobileAds can now be called.
            })
        .start();
  }
}

Exclude com.google.android.gms modules in mediation integrations

Mediation adapters continue to depend on the current Next Gen Mobile Ads SDK. However, Next Gen Mobile Ads SDK includes all classes required by mediation adapters. To avoid compile errors related to duplicate symbols, you need to exclude the current Next Gen Mobile Ads SDK from being pulled in as a dependency by mediation adapters.

In your app-level build.gradle file, exclude both play-services-ads and play-services-ads-lite modules globally from all dependencies.

configurations {
  all {
    exclude(group = "com.google.android.gms", module = "play-services-ads")
    exclude(group = "com.google.android.gms", module = "play-services-ads-lite")
  }
}

Check which ad network adapter class loaded the ad

Here is some sample code that logs the ad network class name for a banner ad:

Kotlin

BannerAd.load(
  BannerAdRequest.Builder("AD_UNIT_ID", AdSize.BANNER).build(),
  object : AdLoadCallback<BannerAd> {
    override fun onAdLoaded(ad: BannerAd) {
      Log.d(
        "MyApp", "Adapter class name: " +
          ad.getResponseInfo().mediationAdapterClassName
      )
    }
  }
)

Java

BannerAd.load(
  new BannerAdRequest.Builder("AD_UNIT_ID", AdSize.BANNER).build(),
  new AdLoadCallback<BannerAd>() {
    @Override
    public void onAdLoaded(@NonNull BannerAd ad) {
      Log.d("MyApp",
          "Adapter class name: " + ad.getResponseInfo().getMediationAdapterClassName());
    }
  }
);

Make sure to disable refresh in all third-party ad source UIs for banner ad units used in AdMob Mediation. This prevents a double refresh since AdMob also triggers a refresh based on your banner ad unit's refresh rate.

US states privacy laws and GDPR

If you need to comply with the U.S. states privacy laws or General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), follow the steps in US state regulations settings or GDPR settings to add your mediation partners in AdMob Privacy & messaging's US states or GDPR ad partners list. Failure to do so can lead to partners failing to serve ads on your app.

Learn more about enabling restricted data processing (RDP) and obtaining GDPR consent with the Google User Messaging Platform (UMP) SDK.

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