AdMob limited ad serving on the wrong app
Originally published on indiecore.net . Logo Quiz: Guess Brand is Android-only and has been on Play for a few versions. At some point I created a second AdMob app for it. I no longer remember why — probably to start clean after fumbling something in the first one. The result was AdMob limited ad serving on the game that was actually live — ads coming from an app AdMob would not verify, next to a verified app with nothing in it, and no way to swap them from the Play Console. What "limited" actually means here AdMob will happily give you an app ID and ad unit IDs before it knows the app exists in a store. Until you link that AdMob app to its store listing, it stays unverified, and unverified apps get limited ad serving — low fill, low eCPM, no programmatic demand. The ads are not off. They are just worth very little, which is harder to notice than an outage. It is worth being precise about which limit this is, because the phrase is overloaded. Search for admob limited ads and most of what comes back is the Policy centre kind: a violation, a suspension, a temporary ad serving limit placed on your AdMob account while somebody reviews it. That was not my problem, and nothing below will lift one. Mine was the boring administrative kind — an app nobody had ever linked to a store listing — and the fix has nothing to do with policy. The rule nobody states until you hit it A Play Store listing links to exactly one AdMob app. That single sentence is the whole problem. My second AdMob app had claimed the Logo Quiz listing and been verified. My first AdMob app — the one whose IDs were compiled into the APK people had actually installed — could not be linked, because the listing it needed was already spoken for. AdMob does not offer to move the link. The console simply does not show the listing as available any more. So there were two apps, and each was missing exactly what the other had: App A (in the build) App B (linked) Ad units banner, interstitial, rewarded none Store listi