Admob interstitials not clickable on Nexus 5 (Android 4.4.2)

[Lyuben Penkovski]

Do you know of a problem with Admob interstitial Ads not being clickable and therefore not bringing any revenue on Nexus 5 devices?

Facts:

1. It does not happen with all interstitial ads - some are clickable, but most are not.
2. It happens both with the old standalone Google Admob SDK and with the new Google Play Services SDK.
3. It happens on Nexus 5 with Android 4.4.2, but maybe it's possible that other devices are affected too.
4. It happens in many programs in the Google Play Store that I've tested with - not only with my application. For example, you can check CPU-Z
5. It happens with Bulgarian ads. I haven't tested with ads in different locations, as my location is Bulgaria and the Ads I get from the Admob are mostly Bulgarian.
6. It does not happen on Galaxy Nexus (Nexus 3), Galaxy S, HTC One.
7. Below is a screenshot from the Ad. The little INFO button in the bottom is clickable and opens ok, the X close button is also working ok, however clicking on the Ad does not do anything - as if it does not exist or there is something above it.

Do you know of any workaround or possible solution to the problem? Thank you!

[Amy Quispe (AdMob SDK Team)]

Hey Lyuben,

This looks like it may be a problem with particular ads. Could you go into your ad review center (in the admob interface) and block the ads that are causing this problem?

Amy Quispe

[Lyuben Penkovski]

Hi Amy, thank you for your answer!

 

I think the problem is more serious and unfortunately the solution that you proposed is not possible, because this happens with all Ads except one. Therefore I cannot disable 90% of the Ads in the console. Here are the details that can give you or your dev team some clue about why this happens.

 

1.    1. The device is brand new Nexus 5 with default settings bought before one week. Not rooted. I also restarted it a few times in case something in it is hanged.

2.  2. 2. The problem happens with all of the following Ads. One interesting thing to note is the last ad – Taxistars. The ad has screenshots (four rectangles in black box below the main icon) and these are scrollable via touch gestures and the Ad seems to work ok – however DOWNLOAD or clicking anywhere else on the Ad still does not lead to the store for download as it does on the other devices (and as it should be)

 

3.     3.The only Ad that is clickable is displayed below (SAGITTARIUS). It is the only Ad that works as it should. It looks like Flash and it does not have the little Info button in the bottom of the screen – instead it has some info button in the top right corner. It seems like a different Ad format that you serve and only with with it (or maybe this ad type) there is no problem. Unfortunately, this ad format comes only 10% of the time and the other 90% percent of the Ads are not clickable, because they are of the first more common type.

 

 

To be honest this seems like a serious problem to me, as I may also guess that Nexus 5 may not be the only affected device.

 

Can you please give this info to your development team to test with a new Nexus 5 device? I would be very happy if you can share more details later.

 

Thanks again and waiting to hear from you soon!

Lyuben

[Lyuben Penkovski]

It seems that the user interface of the google groups is rather unfriendly to say the least and it's a huge work to post a few images and a few lines of text just to see later that it even does not work.

So here is the image for the ad that is clickable and works OK (SAGGITARIUS):

All other ad types don't work (are not clickable).

[Lyuben Penkovski]

Hi Amy, I found one more thing that could be useful for your team to search for the issue.

I managed to solve the problem on my Nexus 5 device by going to the Google Settings application -> Ads -> Reset advertising ID

After resetting the ID, the ads started working and became clickable. 

However, this is not a thing that any normal user will do. A user will see the ad, try to click on it and if it doesn't work he will not search the internet for a solution. He will think that the ads implementation (or the the application itself) is buggy and will continue his life without caring. I doubt that a user will go to reset his advertising ID manually so that he can click on ads.

Thanks for any help and good week!

Lyuben

--

---
You received this message because you are subscribed to a topic in the Google Groups "Google AdMob Ads Developers" group.
To unsubscribe from this topic, visit https://groups.google.com/d/topic/google-admob-ads-sdk/PfGWA9MyOLU/unsubscribe.
To unsubscribe from this group and all its topics, send an email to google-admob-ads...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.