mediatedAdView == nil after Upgrading from Legacy Admob to new Admob website

[Amad Marwat]

I upgraded my legacy google Admob account to the new Admob website but after doing that my apps which were using Admob mediation for serving Ads have been showing the ads differently now. By different i mean that as our apps are mainly Tab Bar based application and we have coded them such that they are supposed to show the Ads above the Tab Bar but now because of this problem the Ads are being shown on top (superimposed) of the Tab Bar itself practically making our apps useless because the users are now not able to change tabs to use different functionality of our apps.

Upon further inspection of the code i found out that this problem is due to the fact the GADBannerView has its "mediatedAdView" property set to “nil” most of the time now whenever the ad is received from the Admob server. Our app uses this property to determine the size of the ad banner which when it is nil shows its size to be zero thus showing the ads on top of the Tab Bar. I would like to mention the fact here that we have using this code for more than a year with Admob mediation with no problems at all until today. 

So could you guys please tell me why this problem has starting occurring after my migration to the new Admob site and is there anything you could do to fix this problem at your end. Because the only way that i can think of doing to resolve this problem is by disabling the Admob ads altogether until i find a fix and upload a new update for the respective apps, which i dont want to do because these Ads are main source of revenue generated by these apps.

[Amad Marwat]

I would alos like to bring in to your attention that the Admob reporting site is showing a 7 times increase in my Ad revenues which i think is mainly due to the reason that the app users are clicking on the Ads (overlapping the TabBar) in order to make them go away. I wanted to let you guys know because i dont want Admob to think of this as some kind of "foul play" from my side.

[Eric Leichtenschlag]

For requests coming from migrated users, there is an optimization made where if AdMob is your first network, the first request will just return an AdMob ad instead of returning a mediation config and needing another trip to the server to fetch an ad first. From the SDKs perspective, it never got a mediation config, so it was never mediating, so it doesn't set the mediatedAdView property.

A quick fix for now, which doesn't require an app release, would be to add a custom event at the top of your mediation chain targeting a class that doesn't exist. Since AdMob would no longer be first, the initial request a mediation config. The SDK would then try the custom event network first and would immediately fail (gracefully) because the class doesn't exist. Then a request will be made to AdMob; when it succeeds, the mediatedAdView property will be set.

Longer term, I'd recommend updating your logic for sizing the view. We should also document that this property will be nil if you aren't effectively mediating.

Thanks,
Eric

[Eric Leichtenschlag]

Actually, changing the size of the GADBannerView frame is a poor recommendation altogether. If the GADBannerView's size changes, it will automatically run a new request against the new size, and use that new size for future refreshes. I have a bug filed to update the mediatedAdView documentation to remove this suggestion.