Why Testing Mobile Ads Needs Automation More Than Ever

Ads are an easy way to monetize your app. By integrating Ads, you can start earning right away.

Ad testing is one of the staples of market research as it directly appeals to measuring and improving marketing effectiveness. Ad testing itself comes in a variety of different flavors depending on where the advert is in development and implementation.

Automated regression testing is crucial in this process, ensuring that new ad SDKs or updates don’t break existing ad functionality within the app. Testing mobile in-app Ads has traditionally been a painful, time-consuming, and cumbersome process. It requires maintaining test apps for each SDK and setting up Ad placements on ad servers. For example, to just test one Ad, a user had to set it up multiple times and then test it in different apps.

Importance of ad testing

Brand advertisers and their agencies only want to pay for mobile ads that are seen by a person. They do not want to pay for ads that are not ‘viewable’ i.e. they don’t render or are displayed where they are invisible; or for insufficient time to register the message.

With brand advertising a mobile ad does not count as an impression and the advertiser thus should not be charged if:

The ad is not seen by a real person; Because it fails to render or is displayed where it is unseen, e.g. below the fold, when the visitor doesn’t scroll; or If there is insufficient time for the visitor to digest its message.

Key Benefits of automating ad testing:

Improved usability

Augmented testing manual for productivity and efficiency looking to enable a rapid feedback delivery and a fast, repeatable and reusable testing software products

Improved flexibility

Reduced time-to-market and cost improvements by focusing on agile software development and scalable testing methodology

Improved productivity

Enhanced reliability of product functionalities and automated business flows inside the testing automation framework.

Improved quality

Increased efficiency of ad serving and data managing processes through faster product builds confirmation and product releases.

There are various mobile automation tools available in market such as Appium, XCTest, etc. that can be used to write automation scripts for testing ads.

What we can achieve using ad test automation:

Test if ad is visible: We can write test cases that determines if Ad is actually visible on particular screen or not.
Test the size of the Ad that is displayed is correct: We can write test cases that verify the frame size of the displayed Ads.
Verify network requests are made for Ads: We can write test cases that verify which network call is made for each ad. This can be useful feature when application has multiple ad domains.
Verify the amount of data consumed by Ad network calls: We can check the data consumption of the ad calls. It can be useful for performance testing, as we don’t want ads to slow down page load of application.
Verify Ad load time: We can test the amount of time it takes to load the Ad. Typically Ad takes 3 to 5 seconds to load.

Conclusion

Ad monetization is a valuable revenue stream, but ensuring a seamless and effective ad experience is equally important. Poorly rendered, invisible, or slow-loading ads not only diminish user experience but also impact revenue potential, especially when advertisers demand viewability and performance accountability.

That’s where automated ad testing becomes critical. It eliminates the pain points of manual testing by enabling consistent, reliable, and fast validation of ad visibility, load time, frame size, network behavior, and data usage. With tools like TestGrid, QA teams can easily automate mobile ad tests on real devices—streamlining workflows, reducing errors, and accelerating release cycles.

Ultimately, integrating automated ad testing helps maintain quality, protect user experience, and maximize ad revenue—ensuring your app performs well, both technically and commercially.

Source: For more details, readers may refer to TestGrid.