Sign in with Google In our last article, we discussed why finding trusted partners is critical to delivering on performance. Yet, lasting monetization performance is impossible without deeply engaged users.
Mobile users are searching, streaming, scrolling, and shopping in bursts while commuting, waiting in line, or multitasking. According to RealityMine, the average smartphone user interacts with around 18 different apps per day, racking up to 200 app sessions daily.1 In every one of those moments, attention is won seconds at a time — and lost just as quickly.
Capturing value in those seconds, however, is remarkably difficult. When audience acquisition is expensive and engagement is just as hard to earn, app studios cannot afford ad experiences that cause churn.
The real cost of a disruptive ad
Monetization and user retention are often treated as competing priorities. The assumption is that earning more revenue requires heavier ad loads, which damages the user experience — while protecting that experience means leaving money on the table.
Last year, we partnered with Deloitte to analyze how in-app ads impact audience behavior. What we found was that disruptive ads not only drive current users away but also prompt negative reviews, derailing future users from downloading the app. Seems intuitive, but now there is data to back that. In fact, a single encounter with a disruptive ad increases a user’s likelihood to churn by 6% to 7%.2 When those experiences repeat, 52% of gamers say they leave the app for good.3 On the flip side, high quality, user-first ad experiences actively protect engagement: 72% of gamers keep playing when ads are high quality,4 and 20% report playing more often.5 Ad quality is not a cosmetic preference. It is a retention strategy that fuels user lifetime value.
Turning ad quality into app growth
Sustainable revenue growth doesn’t come from aggressive ad strategies that disrupt your audience. It comes from pairing global, premium demand with uncompromising quality controls. This is the foundation that protects your in-app experience and grows long term revenue opportunities.
To truly scale revenue, safety cannot be restricted to a single network. That’s why we’ve built our advanced ad quality protections to extend across the AdMob network and participating third-party bidders. Studios can filter out unwanted categories, block problematic creatives, and apply brand rules across their demand stack from a single interface. Toss, a financial app company from South Korea’s Viva Republica, chose AdMob as their mediation partner to grow revenue through quality ad experiences. By using AdMob’s real-time ad review and rigorous A/B testing capabilities, Toss grew ad revenue 891% year over year, while also driving 17% uplift in next-day retention for one of their app’s features.6
Through quality ad experiences, users can stay engaged longer and you can naturally unlock more opportunities for other revenue streams, like in-app purchases and subscriptions. According to SensorTower data, apps primarily using AdMob’s mediation platform have a 25% higher 60-day and 90-day user retention rate than apps primarily using competing platforms.7,8 Our focus on quality and long term growth explains why in recent research, Kantar found that app developers rank Google AdMob #1 in both providing high-quality ads and in maximizing revenue, ahead of other leading app monetization platforms.9,10
Delivering quality ad experiences with ease and control
As app development cycles continue to accelerate, your monetization operations must keep pace. Instead of losing critical hours to manual creative review, your teams can lean on our intelligent brand safety systems to help. For example, improved AI models in the Ad Review Center swiftly flag off-brand creatives for removal. In parallel, our click-through-rate (CTR) based filtering helps you block deceptive ad behaviors like forced redirects, fake buttons, or hidden close icons — helping you eliminate these formats across all bidding sources before they trigger player frustration.
For ads that need a closer look, we’re putting you in control with revamped search filters in the Ad Review Center. This helps your teams find creatives faster — for example, by sorting creatives by revenue to prioritize the reviews that impact your bottom line.
By protecting both developer velocity and creative safety, we make it easier for your teams to grow revenue and focus on the user experience. That balance of automation and control is why app developers rate Google AdMob 1.5x higher than competitor average for making it easy to monetize apps.11
Designing for what’s next
Delivering on ad quality and making monetization simple is only the start. We’re also building automated controls to save your team manual hours, from pre-flight diagnostic tools that catch test errors, to programmatic APIs that help optimize complex mediation setups. To support your team’s need for speed and control, we are moving toward agentic systems that evaluate auction dynamics, player engagement, and demand signals in real time. Soon, these tools will help you catch performance anomalies, implement and validate ad placements, and preserve player retention.
At this year’s Global App Summit, we’ll share a closer look at the next generation of intelligent tools designed to accelerate your growth.
Stay tuned for more.
