Q: Can I use the AdMob SDK jar as a dependency in my maven android project? I'm just switching my build process to use maven, I can't find the dependency for AdMob on the maven repository site, how can I configure it manually?
Such as : 
<dependencies>
        <dependency>
            <groupId>com.google.android</groupId>
            <artifactId>android</artifactId>
            <version>2.2.1</version>
            <scope>provided</scope>
        </dependency>
    </dependencies>


A: An easy way to do this is to have the lib in your source tree and use this:
...
<dependency>
  <groupId>some_admob_groupid</groupId>
  <artifactId>admob</artifactId>
  <version>admob_version</version>
  <scope>system</scope>
  <systemPath>${basedir}/lib/admob.jar</systemPath>
</dependency>
...

Of course you need to change the groupId, artifactId, version and systemPath to suit your needs but this approach lets you have a local .jar in your pom.xml as a dependency without installing it to your repository.

A: I saw this still didn't have the answer OP originally wanted, so despite it being a bit older, here's for future Googlers:
Download the jar from https://developers.google.com/mobile-ads-sdk/download
Put this in your pom.xml (with the appropriate version of course):
<dependency>
    <groupId>com.admob.android</groupId>
    <artifactId>ads</artifactId>
    <version>6.4.1</version>
</dependency>

And then run this on your shell, again with the appropriate version/jar name:
mvn install:install-file -Dfile=GoogleAdMobAdsSdk-6.4.1.jar -Dversion=6.4.1 -DartifactId=ads -DgroupId=com.admob.android -DgeneratePom=true -Dpackaging=jar

Mind you that the above command has the version that you need to change in two places - once in the filename, and once in the -Dversion parameter.
It might also be a good idea to include the latest version of the library in your project and have something like the following in your pom.xml above the dependency, as this isn't a step you are likely to remember if you had to google it ;)
<!--  If you just set up your dev system and the following dependency gives you an error,
    run these commands:

    cd project-root
    mvn install:install-file -Dfile=libs/GoogleAdMobAdsSdk-6.4.1.jar -Dversion=6.4.1 -DartifactId=ads -DgroupId=com.admob.android -DgeneratePom=true -Dpackaging=jar

-->

