Re: Some more issues with SMART_BANNER on Android using SDK v6.2.1

[William Ferguson]

I don't use the smart banners. Instead I wrap the AdView in my own ViewGroup that controls centering, background etc. I get pretty good mileage from that with consistent behaviour across all devices.

William

On Saturday, December 29, 2012 1:45:22 AM UTC+10, Dedicadroid wrote:

Hi,

My setup:

- google admob v621

- android

- using SMART_BANNER

- using demo Banner XML app

The ads are not showing  up consistently yet for SMART_BANNER. Even though some are not admob's ads (or not smartbanner enabled), it would of course be great if they all would show the same and *definitely* without the black borders. Especially since tablets are getting more and more important.

See below my findings:

1) On Galaxy Tab 2 android 3.2 I don't get the black borders on any of the ads, though I'm not able to get the same ads as on the Nexus 7, so can't be 100% sure.

     Sometimes an ad still appears left aligned though, while not of the others do. See screenshot 01.

2) On the Nexus 7 android 4.1.2 I do get the black borders and not even centered vertically sometimes. See screenshot 02.

3) On S2 phone android 4.0.3 I'm not able to get the above (badly looking) behavior.

4) On the emulator with android 1.5 and on the Galaxy S2 phone sometimes the (demo) app just crashes, without any error report abilities. I'm 99,9999999% sure it's because of the smartbanner, because without it I was never able to make the app crash....

With regular BANNERs all ads do appear in the middle but of course not stretched in any way.

Similar issues are reported here 

and here

Hopefully this helps you guys point down the current issues even better :)

Best regards,

Dedicadroid

[William Ferguson]

Well, I also switch AdSize depending upon the device:

        final int adBannerSize = getResources().getInteger(R.integer.adBannerSize);

        switch (adBannerSize) {

            case 1 :

                adSize = AdSize.BANNER;

                break;

            case 2 :

                adSize = AdSize.IAB_BANNER;

                break;

            case 3 :

                adSize = AdSize.IAB_LEADERBOARD;

                break;

            default:

                Log.w(AppConstants.TAG, "No AdSize specified");

                adSize = AdSize.BANNER;

                break;

        }

        if (AppConstants.DEV_LOGGING) Log.v(AppConstants.TAG, "(ads) Admob adBannerSize=" + adBannerSize);

        admobAdView = new AdView(this, adSize, AppConstants.ADMOB_MEDIATION_ID);

I'm currently using 3 for large-tvdpi, xlarge-land and xlarge-port and 1 for everything else. 

William

On Monday, December 31, 2012 9:42:47 PM UTC+10, Dedicadroid wrote:

Yeah currently I don't use smart banners either and do the centering myself too, but smart banners look promising in for example stretching and fitting for larger devices like tablets. 

With the regular BANNER you get a small ad centered in the middle on tablets. That doesn't look that great.  Smart banners definitely improve the ad-experience, except for those I posted, those make your app look not so good.....   

PS: also for the smartbanners I do the centering, that's why it's weird as in screenshot 1 it is just not centered (but many other ads are). And the 2nd screenshot has a similar centering problem, it is centered horizontally but not vertically (but many others ads are), and more important, it has those ugly black borders...  So the problem seems to be ad-specific maybe....

[Eric Leichtenschlag]

Hey Dedicadroid,

Are these screenshots both of AdMob ads (particularly the first one, I'm sure the second one is)?

There very well may still be some lingering issues with the internal smart banner rendering. I'll forward these screenshots to the formats team to confirm any issues. Some things I can answer now:

- The reason you see the black background in screenshot 2 but not screenshot 1 is because Android 4.0 (and perhaps 4.1) has a WebView transparency bug. So instead of a white WebView background, we add a black layer, which is the Android default color. However, text ads generally span the entire width of the screen, so you shouldn't see the black background.

- I'm not sure we center vertically. I take it you're using WRAP_CONTENT on the banner height. So if the text ad is rendered properly, you won't have this issue.

- Android 1.5 had this SIGSEGV error that acted like a silent crash. The workaround is to call adView.destroy() in your onDestroy(). The XML example, unfortunately, doesn't have this piece though, as it attempted to demonstrate that you don't need to write any Java code to set up AdMob. But this snippet may fix your issue:

  @Override

  public void onDestroy() {

    AdView adView = (AdView) findViewById(R.id.your_adview_id);

    if (adView != null) {

      adView.destroy();

    }

    super.onDestroy();

  }

Thanks,
Eric

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[Eric Leichtenschlag]

These are both issues with backfill serving on the formats side. I've filed a bug internally for these to get fixed.

Thanks,

Eric

On Sat, Jan 5, 2013 at 4:44 AM, Dedicadroid <marc...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Eric,

Thanks for the feedback.

Just checked my Admob settings and I don't use Mediation (it says "No mediation placements created." on the page https://mediation.admob.com/). So I guess the first one is then also an Admob ad, right?

Yes I use WRAP_CONTENT for the height. Maybe because of the black Webview background I just noticed it's not centered vertically, but that normally it is always aligned to the top anyway.

Saw your reply on my post regarding the crash here too, thanks it works!

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