How to show a full-screen ad (like Flixster) randomly in an iOS app? - ios

I have recently started programming in iOS. I found this really interesting way of showing an Ad in the Flixster app. It randomly pops up a latest movie banner and asks to watch trailer or skip to continue using the app. How is it actually implemented? how can they be pushing a variable screen (may be a view) at runtime? Every time you open the app, you see a different banner.

I work for Flixster and here's how we do it:
Every time the app starts or resumes, the app pings our API to ask for what ads should be shown. Our api gives our app the url of the image to be shown, as well as the click-through url, which can be a regular url, or a custom link to one of our native pages like viewing a trailer, or a movie info page.
We have an admin tool where we can upload the ad image, modify the properties of the ads, or remove old ads and add new ads. However, we've recently started using 3rd party Ad networks like DFP and Admob (acquired by Google) to take over this management.

Related

AdMob displays different Ads with same ID on iOS

I’ve made a game with libgdx, and imported Google Ads SDK to add ads.
I downloaded a sample project to see how I should have imported Interstital.
But soon I found out that the interstial shown in my app were very different from the one shown in the sample project, but I don’t know why
Does somebody knows what this could be all about?
Sample project interstitial:
My game interstitial:
EDIT: the two projects use the same AdMob account and Ad ID
You can't fully control what you want the users to see in your Interstitial ad. And you have to be mindful of the Google AdMob's best practices and policies too.
If you want a custom layout, you can use Native Ads Advanced (Unified) https://developers.google.com/admob/ios/native-unified
And if you ONLY want a video rewarded ad, there's another format of ad available:
Rewarded Video Ads https://developers.google.com/admob/ios/rewarded-video
I hope this helps.
EDIT: OP knows the info above, apparently. What OP wanted to know is the reason why the two projects have different ad content.
There should be multiple reasons why you experienced that.
Bundle Ids of the apps.
Either of the two projects has set test device id (or simulator id) to generate test ad, and the other one has not, thus giving you different ads.
Some AdMob's FAQs:
Do I have to choose which ads to show in my app?
No. AdMob automatically serves ads to your apps from the AdMob Network
and third-party networks of your choosing. These ads can be targeted
to your app content and audience.
If you do want control over what appears in your app, you can block
ads from certain advertisers and categories from being shown in your
app.
Who decides which ads to show in my app?
AdMob uses an ad auction to automatically select the ads that will
appear on your pages from all the available ad sources. Generally, the
highest performing ads will be shown in your app.
If you do want control over what appears in your app, you can block
ads from certain advertisers and categories from being shown in your
app.
To know more, read: https://support.google.com/admob/answer/7356092?hl=en

iOS app rejected from apple app store because UIWebview

Got App rejection reason from Apple:
Upon further review, we noticed that your app only includes links, images, or content aggregated from the Internet with limited or no native iOS functionality. We understand that this content may be curated from the web specifically for your users, but since it does not sufficiently differ from a mobile web browsing experience, it is not appropriate for the App Store.
Basically, we are using UIWebview and safari as well. for show content, we are using UIWebview. and on click of a banner, we are opening a link in safari. I have already give explanation like
We have one admin panel from where we are adding this detail. But based on our requirement we need to redirect a user to specific link or show content. and for make things easy we have used HTML content. But we have used web view in detail page only. Rest of the screen have Native iOS functionality.
So basically we are not fetching website data. we are showing our own backend panel detail in the application.
But still, they rejected the app.
I'm in the same predicament with my app (it grabs content from my company's website like pictures and text and displays it in a native way). To be clear, I'm not using any webviews to display the content except for the Videos tab (see below).
I wanted to share what I've done so far to make it more "native", so you won't waste your time. My application is tabbed, by the way (Research, Blog Posts, Events, Videos, Bookmarks).
Added offline reading capabilities with Bookmarks to read blog posts and research summaries
Added SpeechSynthesizer so reports could be read to the user
Added push notifications for when new content was released
Removed UIWebViews and replaced with Safari Services (I am using WKWebView to embed videos into UITableView though)
Unfortunately, none of that has worked.

Display ads without leaving app

I'm looking at some ad SDKs and it's difficult for me to find a way to present them without leaving the app. I've tried a handful of them but lets say AdMob for purpose of answering this question.
Is there a way to present AdMob ads in an in-app browser once they are clicked? Or would I have to use a different SDK if I want to achieve that.
If the answer is the latter, what well known Ad SDKs would let me do that?
Opening the target page in Safari and not in an in-app browser is on purpose: Safari allows to better track the users. The reason is related to the cookie handling: Safari stores cookies globally while the UIWebView based in app-browsers have a cookie store restricted to a single app. Therefore with in-app browsers, you cannot track users across apps.
However, there is a solution to mitigate the problem provided you have a certain control about the ads (and aren't simply taking the from a network).
An ad can consist of more than just an image with a target link. It can contain interactive elements. You can take advantage of it by creating an ad that opens an overlay when tapped. The overlay shows a web page within your app. The user can then either close it or tap a link that takes her to a further web page shown in Safari.
The standard API to implement an overlay supported by most ad SDKs is MRAID. Google Mobile Ads SDK (formerly known as AdMob SDK) supports it. The Google SDK additionally supports the AdMob SDK.
Good examples for such ads can be found on a Google support page. Specifically check out "Sample Code for an expandable ad (MRAID)" and "Target window: in-app overlay window".

Facebook Deep Linking on iOS not starting my app

I'm trying to implement Facebook's Deep Linking feature in order to launch game directly when the user taps a story in the native Facebook app. I've configured and enabled Deep Linking. I've then posted on my timeline using my app, it's a link to my game's site. The link contains a special GUID that enables some social activity in-game. When I click the link on web, my website opens normally. When I tap the story in native app, again, my website opens. However, if I tap the via part of the story in the bottom (such as 3 hours ago via MyApp) then my app launches, but it doesn't work for me as the GUID is not passed that way to the app (and also it would be useless to expect people to tap that part of the story). How can I set it up such that when the user clicks the link in a web browser, they will be taken to my website where there is a link to my app that they can download, but when they tap the same link in native Facebook App (only iOS is concerned), the game will launch and the link will be passed to my game? I don't know why it doesn't take me to the app when I click the link.
Here is a screenshot from my app's dashboard:
The URL scheme suffix is only for if I want to use the same ID for multiple apps, which is not the case.

iOS >> Ads Conversion Link: Is there a way to "catch" from which site / banner / ad users got to my app in the App Store?

I did some ads to my apps; the only information I get regarding how many people got to my app is from the sites where I advertised (Google, Facebook, etc...); and this is only showing how many people clicked the link.
I want info about the following:
How many people got to my app page - per each ad that I have
How many people downloaded the app - per each ad that I have
Can anyone assist?
What you are talking about is conversion tracking.
There's no easy way because you don't get stats from the app store page itself, so you have to do it like this:
when the user clicks your banner, record their device IP address in your database.
when they launch your app on their iPhone for the first time, make a call to your website using native code in your app and log the IP address again. If you get a match then you'll know that the user who clicked the banner is the same one who launched the app, therefore they must have just downloaded it from the app store.
It's not perfect because it won't work if there's a long time between them downloading and first launching the app (assuming they don't have a static IP), or if they download the app on a PC and then install it via iTunes later. It should work in a lot of cases though.
Some of the standard analytics packages have this capability already, for example Google/Admob supports tracking a user from clicking an Admob ad to launching the app in this way (Assuming you are using Google analytics in your app):
http://support.google.com/admob/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1704628

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