I’ve seen the Mario live wallpaper uses admob ads in the settings screen, but I haven’t been able to do it myself. If I put the adview into the settings.xml like you would with a normal layout I get a class cast exception.
Here’s a screenshot of the mario live wallpaper to illustrate what I’m trying to do.

Here’s a simpler solution: Create a new preference type that displays a single ad. You can then include that preference type in the xml definition for your preferences to display one or more ads.
Custom Preference Class:
XML Layout for AdmobPreference:
And then you just add something like this into your preferences xml definition: