AdMob banner ad randomly showing video ads sometimes

[Izzy Machado]

Hello,  I have an AdMob banner implemented in my app.  I've had it in my app for about a year but just a few months ago  I started receiving complaints from some customers using my app that a video would show up in the middle of their game with out them ever clicking on the AdMob banner that it would just do it by itself.  I have tried thinking of what can be causing this to show up as if they clicked the banner but never did actually click it and how I could fix this issue.  It has happened more then once now and I keep receiving news that it does this a lot.  I would appreciate if any of the AdMob experts could help me on this one.  I really don't want this to keep happening to my customers and want to continue using admob, thanks!

[Vu Chau (MobileAds SDK Team)]

Hi Izzy,

Are you serving a banner or an interstitial ad in this case?  Strictly speaking, if your designated ad slot is a banner view, then it should serve a static rectangular ad, and not a video.

If you are using mediation, I'd recommend you to go over your mediation settings.  See which network is serving what type of creative (video, image, text, et al.) and determine where the video ad is coming from. If this happens outside of mediation, and if you are able to reproduce this on your devices, I'd highly recommend using Charles to capture the network info.  You can also use  getMediationAdapterClassName() to get the adapter's name that's responsible for this particular creative.

Please also drop AdMob's product support a note so they can investigate this issue further.

Thanks,

Vu Chau

Mobile Ads SDK Team

[Izzy Machado]

Hello Vu Chau,  

I am serving a banner ad in my case, and its not set up for mediation the only network serving ads on it is admob and I checked on my banner ad settings and every thing looks good.  I cannot get this problem to reoccur, it shows up fine every time I see it.  One of my users told me it acts as if they clicked on the banner and shows an advertising video like if they clicked on the banner but they never did and it interrupts the game play.  I wass drop admob support a note right now, thanks for all your help I appreciate it!

[Vu Chau (MobileAds SDK Team)]

Hi Izzy,

Could you ask the user to provide some screenshots and some details of the environment when that issue occurs?  

I'd also walk through the code to make sure that the space reserved for the game content and the ad slot do not interfere with each other.  Because even when the user doesn't intentionally click on the banner ad, if he or she happens to be interacting with the screen at the border area, it could trigger the click-through if the two activities overlap (hence the report on the video showing up as if the banner is clicked).  For more info on this, please see Banner ad guidance.

Cheers,

Vu Chau

Mobile Ads SDK  Team

[Izzy Machado]

Hi Vu Chau,

I have a single instance of an admob banner declared and I move it from view to view so it stays across the view the whole time. The first screen show is the top of the screen how it looked one of the times.  and he said he was only touching the bottom half of the screen away from the banner and it randomly opened the ad video.  and a few other times it has happened by it self.  Im not sure if it could be from the [self.view addSubview:_gAd];. When i run test ads everything works fine and how its suppose to I cant get the banner to open when I try clicking on other parts of the screen

 [_gAd setFrame:CGRectMake(0, 0, 320, 50)];  

  _gAd.rootViewController = self;

    GADRequest *request = [GADRequest request];

    request.testDevices = @[@"3a2daf821394d0d736475566e36357dc"];

    [_gAd loadRequest:request];

     [self.view addSubview:_gAd];

[Vu Chau (MobileAds SDK Team)]

Hi Izzy,

Thanks for providing us the screenshots and for confirming with me the issue.

Your code seems fine to me.  I don't think adding the banner view as a subview is problematic.

At this point, we'd need a Charles log from your user to investigate which creative and ad network are involved in this.  We want to be able to eliminate the possible factors (SDK-related, creative issues, etc.) that are causing this issue.  Do you know if the issue happens to a specific ad unit ID?  If only certain banner ads are known to auto-trigger videos, then we could double-check with the server side/publishers regarding this.

Thanks,

Vu Chau

Mobile Ads SDK Team