How To Add AdMob Ads to your Buzztouch App For Android

UPDATE:  This guide was wrote with Android 2.3.x in mind. The AdMob sdk has changed quite significantly since. Please only use this guide as a reference.


I have seen a few posts in Buzztouch forums about adding AdMob to the apps for Android created with Buzztouch. I have it mostly figured out and would like to share it with you.

The first thing you want to do is download the Admob sdk from Google. Unzip it and save it in a spot that you will not forget. You will use this library often if you want to put ads in all your apps.

In eclipse, right click on the project name and select Properties.

Select Java Build Path on the left and then make sure the Libraries tab is selected at the top. Then click Add External JARS... on the right side of the window. Navigate to where you saved the unzipped AdMob sdk and select the .jar file.









In order for your app to properly maintain the Android activity stack while displaying rich advertising it must instantiate a com.google.ads.AdActivity in its AndroidManifest.xml file.

You need to add these two lines to you manifest files right before the closing application tag.

          <activity android:name="com.google.ads.AdActivity"
                        android:configChanges="keyboard|keyboardHidden|orientation"/>


Use this picture as an example.








All Buzztouch apps need the permissions INTERNET and ACCESS_NETWORK_STATE so they should be already enabled. Double check your manifest file to be sure they are.

Here is the tricky part. Since you do not have a main.xml file in your res/layout folder, you need to experiment with the layouts on the individual screens. I am not going to walk you through this part. It really trial and error as to how you make your layout and if it works. I can get it to work on some screens and not on others.

Here is a pic of my act_home.xml file.

Here is a pic of the global_title_dark.xml file.











Make sure you add  xmlns:ads="http://schemas.android.com/apk/lib/com.google.ads" to your layout above you ad code as in the top example on this page.

As I said, this is a trial by error method until Buzztouch incorporates ads in their apps.

Here are some screehshots of my app with AdMob ads. I could not get the ads to work with the screens that have the light colored title bar. Most likely an error in the layout on my part. When I get time, I will go back and look at the code to see what I did wrong.

I would have liked the ads to appear at the bottom of the screen but when I tried that, they appeared in the middle of the screen where the list is. Literally on top of the list. That is why I decided to leave them at the top.