For RDC West I ran some ad experiments with our user ad system which basically proved that someone with a fun game that sells things can make a lot of money running user ads. It also left me wanting more features and stats related to ad performance. I know what I want in terms of stats (things like knowing how many game plays and purchases resulted from ads, time spent in game, CPC, etc). I would like to know what stats and features you guys are most interested in with regard to ads. Please post suggestions.
So I’m totally clear - we aren’t working on this it’s just something I am interested in and I just want to collect your great suggestions while this is top of mind.
It would be cool if there was a way to reward players in your game if they click your ad. Like if they clicked your ad they get 500 points of what ever point system in your game or get a special weapon in your game what ever you want to reward them in your game. It would also be cool if there was a stat for how many people that clicked your ad played the game.
Great requests Masterbeyblade! I agree that knowing how many people played your game would be a great feature that would help you know how much you should be spending on ads. Do any of you guys use ads for anything other than games? Outfits? Group joins?
Thanks. Like I said for to see how many that clicked your ad played your game it would be good to see how many that clicked your ad bought your outfits or joined your group. I don’t really have many ideas for clothing ads but there needs to be some kind of change to them cause they go really unnoticed and shrugged off. If we could upload GIF ads you could put a full 3D view of the clothing that way it brings peoples eyes to it and they get a full view of it.
I’ve advertised some clothing in the past, I’d probably run some ads if I made some more clothing, which I’ve thought about doing. It seems having a stat on purchases after click through would go in hand with games.
Let me run ads for 7 days at a time instead of having to login every day and re-run all my ads.
Let me run ads for 5 minutes at a time to burst my ad spend and fill up my test servers quickly
GROUP MY ADS BY GAME in the advertising panel. That’s a total mess right now (blame John).
Give user ads moderation priority. If I’m ready to plunk down 10k on an ad buy, don’t make me wait 4 hours for the image to get moderated.
Big Improvements
Track Return On Investment for each ad. This calculation is different depending on whether I am advertising a place, group, or clothing. What I want to know is how much revenue can be tied directly to my ad purchase. Note this is tricky in the case where the purchase happens several days after the user clicks on the ad.
Auto-bid. I am happy to spend up to 17 ROBUX per new user for Nuke the Whales, because that is how much money I make. ROBLOX should run my ads automatically whenever I can get new users for less than 17 ROBUX. There are lots of caveats here. I need to be able to set daily spend caps and this implies that my ads are always running at a low-level
Targeted ads. Show my ads to people who are more likely than average to visit my place. This makes all of our ad inventory more valuable.
Let me target ads. Age groups, gender, platform, people who have Favorited a game in a list that I specify. Note this allows re-targeting because I can specify my own game. This is super cool for me when I have a major new update because these ads will be high ROI. Even better, let me target only the people who have already spent money in my game.
User-made video ads in-game that can be played on PC/Mac alongside the existing inventory there is for mobile.
Track retention. If I new user comes to my game via an ad, what percent of the time do they play again in the next week?
In the developer stats page, track organic and paid traffic separately. Bonus if we can also track incoming traffic from social media.
Let me run ads for 7 days at a time instead of having to login every day and re-run all my ads.
Let me run ads for 5 minutes at a time to burst my ad spend and fill up my test servers quickly
GROUP MY ADS BY GAME in the advertising panel. That’s a total mess right now (blame John).
Give user ads moderation priority. If I’m ready to plunk down 10k on an ad buy, don’t make me wait 4 hours for the image to get moderated.
Big Improvements
Track Return On Investment for each ad. This calculation is different depending on whether I am advertising a place, group, or clothing. What I want to know is how much revenue can be tied directly to my ad purchase. Note this is tricky in the case where the purchase happens several days after the user clicks on the ad.
Auto-bid. I am happy to spend up to 17 ROBUX per new user for Nuke the Whales, because that is how much money I make. ROBLOX should run my ads automatically whenever I can get new users for less than 17 ROBUX. There are lots of caveats here. I need to be able to set daily spend caps and this implies that my ads are always running at a low-level
Targeted ads. Show my ads to people who are more likely than average to visit my place. This makes all of our ad inventory more valuable.
Let me target ads. Age groups, gender, platform, people who have Favorited a game in a list that I specify. Note this allows re-targeting because I can specify my own game. This is super cool for me when I have a major new update because these ads will be high ROI. Even better, let me target only the people who have already spent money in my game.
User-made video ads in-game that can be played on PC/Mac alongside the existing inventory there is for mobile.
Track retention. If I new user comes to my game via an ad, what percent of the time do they play again in the next week?
In the developer stats page, track organic and paid traffic separately. Bonus if we can also track incoming traffic from social media. [/quote]
Basically everything here, couldn’t have said it better myself.
I think that the Shedletskies hit the nail right on the head with all of the potential updates - I would find all of these stats and features useful and can’t think of anything else I’d want/need.
Allow me to delete groups ads for a group I’m no longer in.
Also, it would be supercalifragilisticexpialidocious if you could make MY clicks on my OWN ad not count. Sometimes I want to check sales but I’m on the forum. So I wait until my ad pops up. But then I mess with my own CTR.
Let me advertise any item on the site even if I am not the owner or creator.
(as long as it respects some sort of privacy setting)
Allow me to see some sort of site-wide marketing trends and a queue/list of current campaigns
In addition to John’s suggestions, let me group a bunch of ads together as a “campaign”
Running a campaign would run all the ads within the group at the settings you’ve set up
How about a pay-per-click type of ad. This would have to be added as a configuration of the ad. When you ran the ad, you only have to put in a fraction of the normal amount to get your ad seen a lot; however, for every click your ad gets you have to pay a predetermined amount. In the ad configurations you could also add a cap to how much money your are willing to pay in total for clicks and once that maxes out your ad will stop running.
This could be really useful for testing out an ad. You could simply max out the number of possible clicks at ten and then see how quickly your ad gets clicks. I’m not entirely sure this would work, just wanted to throw it out there.
[quote] Let me advertise any item on the site even if I am not the owner or creator.
(as long as it respects some sort of privacy setting)
Allow me to see some sort of site-wide marketing trends and a queue/list of current campaigns
In addition to John’s suggestions, let me group a bunch of ads together as a “campaign”
Running a campaign would run all the ads within the group at the settings you’ve set up [/quote]
What would be really cool is if I could create a campaign full of ads and ROBLOX would optimize which ones to show of those based off CTR or CPA, like AdWords does.
[quote] How about a pay-per-click type of ad. This would have to be added as a configuration of the ad. When you ran the ad, you only have to put in a fraction of the normal amount to get your ad seen a lot; however, for every click your ad gets you have to pay a predetermined amount. In the ad configurations you could also add a cap to how much money your are willing to pay in total for clicks and once that maxes out your ad will stop running.
This could be really useful for testing out an ad. You could simply max out the number of possible clicks at ten and then see how quickly your ad gets clicks. I’m not entirely sure this would work, just wanted to throw it out there. [/quote]
CPC is a good idea, as long as there are spending caps and frequency caps.
I find that I rarely if ever use the ad system simply because I can’t target ads. I want to be able to target players who mainly play X genre or are in X age range. This would allow me to optimize my ads for the audience I am trying to attract.
Actually, I do have a request: video ads (for 300x250 Rectangle ads only). Obviously, they’d have to be well-moderated, but I think they could be beneficial.