libGDX Trying to implement AdMob but can't get it to work

Newbie & Debugging Questions
#1

I’ve been busy going through a bunch of documentation and tutorials to figure out how to implement AdMob into my game, but no luck so far.

The LibGDX wiki documentation is a bit outdated and some of the code is simply not working https://github.com/libgdx/libgdx/wiki/Admob-in-libgdx
f.e. initializeForView doesn’t take in boolean values anymore , or the adView method can’t be used like this anymore:

 View gameView = initializeForView(new HelloWorld(this), false);

.... or 

  // Create and setup the AdMob view
        adView = new AdView(this, AdSize.BANNER, "xxxxxxxx"); // Put in your secret key here
        adView.loadAd(new AdRequest());

I also worked through the Google AdMob documentation (https://developers.google.com/mobile-ads-sdk/docs/admob/android/quick-start), but it isn’t very good aplicable to a LibGDX project.
I even tried just getting it running with AndroidStudio without using libgdx, but even that I didn’t get to work accordingly.

I tried to work around it, but after a full days of tryingI still haven’t been able to get any test ads on my android device when debugging on my device & any help would be more than welcome.

Can someone help me with this?
Does anyone know some more up to date info on how to set up AdMob in your libgdx project?

Here’s what my AndroidManifest.xml looks like: http://pastebin.java-gaming.org/f9d35261d1111
And here’s a version of my AndroidLauncher.java that I was hoping to show me some adds but it isn’t:http://pastebin.java-gaming.org/9d3563d11111e