I have recently started a 7-day Ad Campaign on the Ads Manager platform, and I have noticed that on several occasions in a day, the system spends a bulk of my Lifetime Budget all at once.
This results in peaks/spikes in CCU, followed by long periods of inactivity. This occurs multiple times a day, with my last spike (~14 hours ago) consuming a massive amount of credits, leading to 1 hour of activity followed by 13 hours of inactivity (so far).
I have highlighted the spikes with a red line. You can always observe that after a peak, player count drops to nearly zero.
This is obviously not the behavior I would want as a new developer, and feels like my hard-earned money is being handled carelessly. Furthermore, I feel like this could harm my game’s performance statistically-wise, resulting in my game having a harder time finding its way to the algorithm.
For context
I have a low Max Bid at 0.02 for all my Ad Sets.
My budget is 200 Ad Credits for this week (150 to Sponsored Ads, 50 to Search Ads).
Servers do not perform worse under a sudden influx of players.
Crash Rates are nominal.
Has anyone else noticed this confusing behavior when running Sponsored Ads or have an explanation to what could possibly be happening?
I’m not sure how this works internally, but it’s some auction-like system. When your bid exceeds that of others, your ad will be shown to them. Judging by the picture, it seems like there’s a bid cycle every few hours.
Now, the peaks are expected if you consider the above explanation. The people who pay more get it first, and when your time comes, as much of it is being used before your time is over. This is likely what causes the spikes. Whether this is good or bad really depends. This is expected behavior.
Thanks for the explanation of the auction system. I can understand how that could lead to the peaks I’m seeing, however, if I wanted short bursts in CCU (as what is currently happening), I would create 1-hour duration campaigns instead of week-long ones. I am looking for lower, but consistent player count, so in my opinion this should not be the expected behavior.
Are there any other campaign options/strategies to keep a more steady player count? Thinking about it, I should not be outbidding this aggressively anyway, as I am pretty sure a 0.02 Max Bid is on the lower side.
I’ve only advertised a handful of times, but I’ve realized that search ads are usually more consistent in addition to a longer playtime from those players (as expected, because they’re searching for a type of game instead of playing something that may be unrelated). However, be aware that the numbers will be significantly lower, and the cost per player will be slightly higher.
