Policy Center: Keeping Your Account Healthy
The Policy Center is a key tool designed to help you stay compliant with Google’s program policies and maintain a healthy ad-serving environment across your apps or sites.
It provides a complete overview of your account health, highlighting any issues that may impact ad delivery or monetization. At the top of the Policy Center, you’ll find a summary that quickly shows the status of ad serving across all your properties, making it easy to spot and address potential problems before they affect your revenue.
Tracking and Sorting Issues
All issues are automatically organized based on the number of ad requests affected, helping you focus on the most critical ones first.
You can also customize your view — sorting by app name, issue type, status, or date reported.
For deeper analysis, the Policy Center allows you to download a CSV report containing details of all affected apps. Just click “Download CSV”, and choose between:
- Download all items, or
- Download a filtered view — depending on what you need.
This makes it easy to share issue reports with your team or integrate them into your internal review workflow.
Types of Policy Issues
There are four main types of issues you might see in your Policy Center:
- Policy Violations: These are mandatory to fix. Ignoring them can stop ads from serving on your app or site.
- Publisher Restrictions: Not required to fix, but your ad serving will remain limited in certain regions or categories.
- Confirmed Click Enforcement: Indicates irregular click patterns. While not mandatory, it’s best to review them to prevent revenue loss.
- Consent Requirement: Usually related to user privacy (e.g., GDPR or regional consent policies). These should be addressed promptly to maintain compliance.
Why It Matters
Only policy violations require immediate action, but staying proactive with all issue types helps ensure:
- Continuous ad delivery
- Stable revenue performance
- Strong compliance reputation
Ignoring even minor issues can eventually impact how your ads perform or how much you earn. Acting early is the best way to keep your account in good standing.
Important Ad Format Metrics to Monitor
To optimize your ad revenue and understand how your placements perform, it’s crucial to track the right metrics.
Here’s a breakdown of the key performance indicators every developer should monitor:
Earnings — How much money do I earn?
This is the total revenue generated from your ads.
It helps you measure how profitable your app is and evaluate the effectiveness of your monetization strategy.
Impressions — How many times were my ads viewed?
Impressions show how often ads are actually displayed to users.
This metric reflects how much of your ad inventory is being monetized and how frequently placements are filled.
eCPM (Effective Cost per Mille) — How much do I earn per 1,000 impressions?
eCPM tells you the average revenue earned per 1,000 ad impressions.
It’s one of the most useful benchmarks for comparing placement profitability across formats, geographies, or user segments.
Requests — How many times does my app request an ad?
Each time your app asks for an ad from the server, it’s counted as a request.
Not all requests result in impressions — some may not be filled if there’s no matching ad available.
Match Rate — How many ad requests receive a valid ad?
Match rate indicates the percentage of ad requests that return a filled ad.
A lower rate could mean limited demand, niche targeting, or policy restrictions — all of which may affect revenue.
Show Rate — From matched ads, how many are actually shown?
This metric shows how many matched ads successfully appeared to users.
If this number is low, it could point to technical errors or app design issues — potentially leading to missed revenue opportunities.
CTR (Click-Through Rate) — How do users engage with my ads?
CTR measures how often users click on ads after seeing them.
A healthy CTR indicates effective ad placement and relevance, while sudden changes or anomalies may reveal accidental clicks or engagement issues.
Pro Tips
Tracking these metrics together gives you a complete picture of your ad performance.
For example:
- High requests but low impressions? → Review your match rate.
- Good impressions but low CTR? → Check your ad placement or format relevance.
- Strong CTR but poor eCPM? → Explore premium demand sources or exchange integrations like AdX.
By understanding how these numbers connect, you can fine-tune your monetization strategy and grow your ad revenue more effectively.
Also don’t just look at totals — analyze your data from multiple angles to find optimization opportunities:
- Compare ad formats (e.g., banner vs. rewarded video)
- Review app versions (older versions may have display bugs)
- Break down performance by country or region to discover where your demand is strongest
The more you slice and dice your data, the easier it is to identify what’s working — and where to improve for higher ad revenue.
