When running a campaign using the Ads Manager, the allocated Ad Credit budget is sometimes fully used up just a few hours into the campaign’s runtime, giving the game a huge boost for the first few hours, and then completely stopping ads once all Credits are used up.
A similar bug report was created around a year ago, but it was mistakenly marked as “Closed” even though it was specifically stated by a staff member reviewing the post that the behavior experienced was not intended.
Said staff member’s comment:
Old bug report with loads of comments of people stating they experienced the issue:
Reproduction:
- Create a Campaign using Ad Credits and a Lifetime Budget. The issue may still occur with other campaign specifications, but the others have not been tested by me.
- Create a Sponsored Experience or Search Ad (other formats have not been tested by me) Ad Set under that Campaign, keeping the potential audience as large as possible to maximize chances of reproducing the bug. Be sure to set Location to “All Regions,” and advertise to all Genders, Ages, and Devices. I ran into the bug with a CPP of 0.2, but I imagine the chances of reproduction would be greater with a higher CPP.
- Create an Ad under the Ad Set. If using Search Ads, use more often-searched, popular keywords for a better chance at repro.
Potential Workarounds:
Advertising to smaller demographics tends to prevent this bug, presumably because it isn’t as easy to get impressions and plays with smaller audience sizes.
Expected behavior
I expect that when running an ad campaign, the budget will be spent relatively evenly across the timeframe I select. For example, when running a 24-hour campaign with a 24 Ad Credit budget, I expect that roughly 1 Credit is spent per hour, bringing in a steady player base for the duration of the campaign’s runtime. I understand that player counts can fluctuate, and some times of day may be more active than others. However, the full budget should never be completely drained just a few hours into a 24-hour campaign.