Has anyone been able to use this ad unit type from Admob? It’s specifically meant for when the player launches your app.
It’s a different option than interstitial and video when creating the ad unit. I’ve tried to get it to work with Solar2D but no luck so far. The Admob plugin docs only mention a few ad unit types and “App Open” isn’t one of them.
My Google rep was just talking with me about them and they sound interesting.
@Scott_Harrison Is there any roadmap to include them in the AdMob plugin?
I ended up shipping my latest update using fullscreen interstitial ads instead. Even though they’re not meant for app open, they seem to be ok.
Only problem is that upon applicationStart there isn’t an ad loaded and ready to show. You have to load it first and then show it. So I’m only showing it on applicationResume currently.
Having actual proper ad types would obviously work better here, but just a thought for you.
Interesting workaround- thanks for sharing!
There are definitely advantages to the App Open ads- namely that they cache from the previous session and they only cover 3/4 of the screen so players aren’t (as) confused about what’s going on. Hopefully we can get them implemented.
Yeah, it would be great to have proper integration for this!
This is now added “appOpen”
Great- thanks Scott!
I can’t help but feel that showing an ad the moment the app opens will be a terrible user experience.
I’d be interested to know how any increase in revenue balances against retention and review scores (both of which will presumably be lower).
I totally agree with you- I don’t think anyone who is interested in crafting a good player experience would greet players on launch with an ad. (Although my rep told me that will totally work because the ads can be cached from the previous session. She suggested I show an ad over my loading screen.)
We make puzzle games, and where I’m interested in experimenting with it is putting them as an applicationResume runtime event on the game scene, so if a player leaves the app mid-puzzle, they’ll see the ad when they come back. Critically, these are essentially giant banner ads that cover 4/5 of the screen with a very large, very clear way to get to the app. It is decidedly not dropping the player into a 30-second commercial when they try to resume your app.
As a side note, I’ve seen big-budget apps that do just that- if you leave in the middle of a puzzle and come back, you get a full-screen, playable ad upon return. It’s like you were dropped into a different app! I guess it’s all a question of what people will accept as “normal” behavior from the apps they play.
Google will always want you to show ads irrespective of whether it kills your KPIs!
I’ve implemented App open ads in one of my apps, but there is loop: when I tap on Continue, the current App open ad is closed and another is loaded, and when it is closed this one, a new App open ad is loaded. How can I avoid this behaviour?
It sounds like the app is being suspended while the ad is being displayed, so you’re getting a new applicationResume runtime event when it’s dismissed. For starters, I’d suggest throwing a few print statements into your code to confirm this.
My first thought would be to have a variable that records what time the ad is shown, and then stick admob.show inside an if statement so the player won’t be shown an appOpen ad unless X amount of time has elapsed. (This seems like a good practice anyway- if life circumstances cause a player to need to repeatedly suspend the app over a short period of time, and they are shown ads over and over, it is likely to frustrate them.)
Yes, I just figured out. I’ve implemented a cache of the time an ad is popup with os.time() in order to check the last time that an App open ad was pop up and it is solved now.
I did exactly what you mean. Thanks anyway