5 Tips From Roblox Staff to Get the Most Out of Thumbnail Personalization

[JavaJiving]

Hi Creators,

We’re excited to share that over 8,000 experiences have adopted Thumbnail Personalization since launch, making it one of Roblox’s fastest-growing creator tools.

To date, experiences with thumbnail personalization saw an average +12% relative lift in qualified play through rate (qPTR) with some even seeing a +56% increase.

To help you achieve similar success, this post will guide you in creating a thumbnail strategy that maximizes your reach and drives more qualified play-throughs.

Here are 5 key best practices to get the most out of Thumbnail Personalization:

1. Avoid restarting tests within 7 days

We recommend waiting at least 7 days, or until your next content update, before making changes to your thumbnail personalization. Frequent thumbnail restarts can prevent our model from accurately identifying the best performing thumbnails.

2. Keep multiple thumbnails active for optimal performance

Maximize your thumbnail performance by keeping as many variations active as possible (up to 5). This allows our system to dynamically optimize and automatically select the top performer. Our data indicates that testing more thumbnails can lead to greater gains.

Your best performing thumbnail can change over time. Restarting tests too soon (as seen at the red line) might impact your upside.

3. Showcase new content or gameplay in your thumbnails

Showcase new content, features, and events in your thumbnails and update them frequently, especially when releasing new content. A fresh thumbnail alongside new gameplay significantly boosts discoverability and signals an actively maintained experience. Avoid clickbait thumbnails that may trigger low-quality content warnings, as accurate representation remains crucial.

4. Avoid testing thumbnails that are too similar

Thumbnails that look too similar make it harder for our system to detect meaningful differences. Try showcasing different gameplay elements (e.g., combat, puzzle-solving, exploration), characters, environments, or even target different player motivations (e.g., competition, creativity, social interaction).

5. Monitor qPTR over time

You might see a temporary dip in your qualified play through rate (qPTR) after a surge in homepage recommendations. This is normal as new players explore your game! Keep monitoring your qPTR and it should stabilize once traffic returns to normal levels.

We’d love to hear your feedback!

We’re always working on improving our personalization model and have plans to expand personalization to more discovery surfaces. Let us know how this feature has been working for you and how we can improve it in the comments.

For more best practices, check out our thumbnail documentation and staff stream:

Thumbnail Personalization on Roblox

Happy creating!

[EtNowis]

thank you for the tips! we’ve been using this and it is fun to watch they battle each other.
we kind of figured out almost the same tips as we tried it out. wished we know them earlier such as the >7-days rule.

one thing we notice is that recent home recommendations bring in a lot of different gender to the game. it went from 4:6 to 6:4 gender wise. however, the thumbnail personalization’s “winning segment” is only by age group (such as <9 , 18+, etc). while age group is also very crucial, is gender also optimized by the algorithm? will there be more options for developers to aim at different combinations, or at least showing also the gender as a winning segment?

we also notice that the table shows Impression, Qualified Plays, Average Session Time, QPTR and winning segment, however, it could be even more informative if it also show Impression CTR, Detailed Page CTR and Play Rate (like that in the Acquisition > New User Funnel > Acquisition). These would reveal the root cause of a specific thumbnail low QPTR so that we could potentially improve it by changing detail page description, or put in that same thumbnail to adjust for the player’s expectation.

[trtman33]

Ah, thanks, but there is already a video giving these same tips and even more.

[yoolurs]

Very good reply. I back all the suggestions made here!

[signal_zzz]

Thanks great feedback! We are testing gender internally and if it helps with personalization will roll out it.

[signal_zzz]

I want to emphasize that the #1 tip is to not restart the test everyday - this will only limit personalization’s ability to find the best thumbnail (which may also change over time). This is so important that we updated the tooltip below to say the same thing

[WorldyBear_22 (WorldyBear)]

Didn’t expect this in the Dev forum

[Reditect]

I remember a note that would show up on my Creator Dashboard under the thumbnail personalization saying for best results I should have 1,000 MAU or DAU. I can’t remember which, maybe it was just impressions, but the note doesn’t show up for me anymore. At least not on mobile when I just checked.

My game is quite small, only having 1,010 visits total over about 4 years. I could, and plan to, use Roblox Ads and market my game to increase impressions, but what would you say to smaller creators like myself regarding personalized thumbnails? Should we hold off till that mark in popularity (if that could be clarified) for effectiveness?

I find it cool technology, but not practical for smaller creators. The subject of needing ads to reach that initial market is a whole other discussion also, but that’s where we’re at with Roblox right now.

[Reditect]

I got an ad on the no ad video…

[DobDobDev (DibDob)]

It would also be useful to have retention by thumbnail (and showing different thumbnails to new and returning users to better show updates?) and why is the “Average Session Time” in the personalization feature on every thumbnail I have ever tried so much lower than the average session length in the stats?

[Draxlyer1]

I think something needs to change with gender and home recommendations. I ran tests with both new male and female accounts and the male accounts never got our game recommended right away while almost all the female accounts were recommended our game immediately. Both genders may get the game recommended again later if they played similar games in the genre, but it is the initial experience with recommendations that is causing this: Our game’s gender ratio is almost 73% female, 19% male and 8% other which is frankly bizarre. And this isn’t a game that appeals to a specific gender either, it’s just an obby. Then we noticed Dress to Impress, a game primarily played by female Roblox players, was recommended to both new male and female accounts immediately.

Thumbnail personalization is a good feature and resulted in a large boost in our home recommendations and players just by having one better thumbnail, and our QPTR is still under 1 percent so that was even more surprising to see such a boost. Now we are a bit hesitant on changing it again in case our recommendations drop, but it’s a good update.

[C9OQI (Cooqi)]

I think thumbnail personalization is great, but unfortunately, qPTR data shown is only for desktop devices which is only around 30% of my game’s player base… it would be great if we could also use an icon personalization feature for more accurate mobile/tablet device qPTR data.

Also, the experience page’s primary thumbnail is likely to have an effect on the qPTR of each thumbnail (ex. thumbnail 1’s qPTR might be 1% if thumbnail 1 is also used as the primary experience page thumbnail, but only 0.8% if thumbnail 2 is used as the primary experience page thumbnail). I imagine that an easy way to fix this issue would be to have an option to set the primary experience page thumbnail to the same one that thumbnail personalization last served the user.

[friedrich1717]

I believe recommendation in Mobile is also thumbnail and is served by the personalization as well. Why do you have the impression the personalization does not apply on mobile devices for your experience?