Using our own apps in production

[Richard Pillay]

I've tried to find this in the T&Cs but it's not covered, so here goes nothing...

I've been worried by people saying in posts that they've been banned for clicking on their own ads. Worried to the point where I ensure that every device I own is listed as a development device. However, this means that I can't get ads on my devices when I'm using my own apps which bugs me, because one of the nice things about Mobile ads is Google's attempt to serve relevant ads. For example, when my son was searching for information about tyres for his car, his app served him ads from local tyre dealers.

Surely, I would be entitled to use my own app in normal life, serving ads (and getting paid for them) as long as I'm not clicking on the ad just to raise revenue? I don't use my physical devices for testing - all my testing is done on emulators.

Does anybody know what the policy is, and where it can be found? I can find something for AdSense which says if a Webmaster is interested in an ad he shouldn't click on it, but enter the URL manually into a browser, but I can't find anything related to AdMob (or should I say Play Services?)

Best Regards,

Richard.

[Andrew Brogdon (Mobile Ads SDK Team)]

This forum is for answering technical questions about the AdMob SDK rather than issues of policy, but I can point you to the help section for this on AdMob.com:

https://support.google.com/admob/answer/2753860

It states, "Publishers may not click their own ads or use any means to inflate impressions and/or clicks artificially, including manual methods. Testing your own ads by clicking on them is not allowed."  This is why we encourage developers to enable test ads on any device used for development.

-Andrew