Sunday, June 27, 2010

How to add Google Adsense Ads to your Android App

After I got a taste of how is to build apps for Android on mobile, I wanted to go further and insert ads into my apps. Other apps that I previously downloaded had that and it wasn't that annoying seeing ads at the bottom of my screen and I felt good that free apps can get people's support through Adsense mechanism.

I read a little bit on the Google's Adsense Setup page that you can "Unlock the revenue potential of your mobile site with targeted Google ads." This sounded so good that I wanted to try.
But wait, Google is talking about my mobile sites where I can put Google ads, while I'm trying to add these ads to my android apps. How can I do that ? You'll see that is not that complicated and in fact is very simple .

And here is how I succeeded adding Google Adsense Ads to my android apps: "World Cup Goal Scream" and "World Cup Red Vuvuzela". You can download these apps from android market to get a feeling of what I'm talking about.

The following is a step by step guide for you and for me. Yes for me too, because we always forget stuff and thank God to the internet that we have a place to come back and save the day.

Ok, let's go

Step 1:
Create a Google account, if you don't have one, and log in to the Google Adsense site (https://www.google.com/adsense)

Step 2:
Select "Adsense Setup" from the menu

Step 3:
Select "AdSense for Mobile Content New high-end devices!" and follow the wizard steps to customize you ads.

Step 4:
Get "Your AdSense code" and save it to an empty html page

<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=windows-1250">
<meta name="www.flyloopproject.com">
<title>World Cup Goal Scream Ads</title>
</head>
<body marginwidth="0" marginheight="0 leftmargin="0"
topmargin="0" style="background-color: black">
.....insert your Adsense Code here.........
</body>
</html>

And save the page, for example call it myads.html

Step 5:
Upload this page to your website, oh you need a place on the internet where you can upload stuff

Step 6:
Test the page on your mobile phone by opening the page that you just upload.
Note!: it won't display any content if you open the page from your computer's web browser. You have to test it on your mobile web browser. Check out my ads page: http://flyloopproject.com/myads.html

Step 7:
Now that you have this page, you probably ask yourself "How the hack do I add it to my app ?"
Well don't worry you are on track to do this.
Take a deep breath of fresh air and proceed with the next step.

Step 8:
Open your Android project and edit the View where you want to add your ads.
For example you can add ads to your main.xml where you'll place a WebView component.

<LinearLayout android:id="@+id/adsHolder"
android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="wrap_content"
android:orientation="vertical" android:layout_alignParentBottom="true"
android:layout_centerInParent="true" android:paddingTop="5px">
<WebView android:id="@+id/adsDisplay" android:layout_width="fill_parent"
android:layout_height="fill_parent" />
</LinearLayout>

Step 9:
All you have to do now is to wire up the WebView component that you just add to your web page created in Step 4

public class MainActivity extends Activity {
/** Called when the activity is first created. */
@Override
public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
setContentView(R.layout.main);
...............
WebView adsDisplay = (WebView) findViewById(R.id.adsDisplay);
adsDisplay.getSettings().setJavaScriptEnabled(true);
adsDisplay.loadUrl("http://flyloopproject.com/myads.html");
...............
}
}

Step 10:
Add user INTERNET permission to your app by editing the AndroidManifest.xml file

<manifest ...>
...............
<uses-permission android:name="android.permission.INTERNET" />
...............
</manifest>

Step 11:
You're done, test it by building your app and run it with your emulator or on your mobile phone and you should see your ads at the bottom of your screen.

A quick overview of the steps
Step 1 : Log in to the Google Adsense site https://www.google.com/adsense
Step 2-3 : Get Your Adsense Code
Step 4 : Save it to an empty web page (example: http://flyloopproject.com/myads.html)
Step 5 : Upload the page to your website
Step 6 : Test it on your mobile
Step 7 : Fresh air
Step 8 : Add a WebView component to a view in your android project
Step 9 : Wire up the component to display you web page that you just created in Step 4
Step 10 : Add INTERNET permission to your app
Step 11 : FINISH (check your heart rate :) )

That's pretty much it.

I hope that you find this posting useful and don't stop building free apps and get support for your development using Google Adsense for mobile.

If you find this blog entry useful don't stop sharing with your friends and CLICK MY ADS to support my development and I'll get you more tutorials

30 comments:

  1. Not a good idea.

    You are not actually allowed to use AdSense ads in Android apps (there is an SDK on the way to allow this to be done legally), and people who have done as you suggest previously have had their Adsense accounts suspended.

    I would recommend people to either wait for Google to release the official Adsense SDK for Android or sign up with Admob (which has been bought by Google) or Mobclix.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Admob won't work if you want keep your app Android 1.6 compatible. This tutorial shows how to keep it.

      Delete
  2. It depends on how you do your mobile ads. If you've been accepted to Google's beta program, by all means go for it - the fill rate is way better. But if you're just making a little window just for your adsense ads, you'll probably get banned for it, like Michael said.

    From the google website, they say that their crawler needs to be able to crawl the website your ads are coming from, and that those ads need to be nested in either WML, XHTML, HTML, or CHTML; with restrictions even on those. (ref https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=71600)

    Although I think this idea is genius, apparently Google doesn't yet. I guess we just have to be patient and wait for the official Adsense SDK.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Its very nice post and very helpful for me in fact...

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  4. Thanks man, it's very usefull "tutorial" for beginers like me ;)

    ReplyDelete
  5. Got plagiarized... http://masimfarooq.wordpress.com/2012/09/07/how-to-add-google-adsense-ads-to-your-android-app/

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