Hi Creators,
Ads can help you find new people who’ll love your games, and keep them coming back. They’re a great way to grow your audience beyond organic discovery, in a way that gives you control.
Today, we’re rolling out some changes to the Ads Manager campaign set up interface, and more targeting options to make things simpler and give you more control over which audience you can reach.
New Ads Manager UI
We split objectives in campaign setup into two steps to make things clearer: pick your goal, then choose your audience.
Step 1: Choose your goal
First, decide what you want your campaign to accomplish. Right now, all campaigns focus on Plays — finding people who’ll actually enjoy your game at the lowest possible cost.
Soon, you’ll have more options, including the ability to reach players more likely to make in-game purchases within your experience.
Tip: Every campaign has a learning period (roughly 24 hours) where the system figures out who’s responding to your ads and adjusts to find more people like them to hit your goal. If you pause your campaign during this learning period, it resets the clock and you’ll start over. Give it at least a day before making changes. We’ll now share a notification in Ads Manager while the learning period is still underway.
Step 2: Pick your audience:
By default, your ads will reach anyone who matches your goal. But you can get more specific:
- New Players – people who haven’t played in 180+ days (or ever)
- Recent Players – people who played in the last 30 days
- Lapsed Players – people who played 30-180 days ago but haven’t been back
To reach multiple audiences (e.g., New Players & Recent Players), simply set up two campaigns and allocate budgets across both.
A heads up: Narrowing your audience means fewer people to reach, which can make your ads more expensive. Even without targeting, Ads Manager works to find the right players for your game. If you’re curious whether targeting helps, try running one campaign with targeting, and one without at the same time to see how your performance looks.
Once you do this, you can get onto setting your budget and creatives!
More Advanced Targeting Options
Thanks to your feedback - under “Advanced Targeting” you can now get specific about who sees your ads.
You can now target your campaigns by:
- Device - show ads to users on specific devices, such as desktop, mobile, and console
- Location - show ads to users in certain countries
- Gender - show ads to male or female users specifically
- Genre - show ads to users that enjoy certain genres of games
- Age - show ads to users in certain age groups to ensure age appropriateness
You can apply this for any combination of goal and audience. Soon, you will also be able to choose whether your ad appears on Home, Search, or both.
Quick tip: If you’re stacking targeting filters, your audience can get pretty narrow, which increases costs. To give the system time to find those specific people, try lowering your daily budget and running your campaign for longer.
The new Ads Manager is built to spend your full budget during your campaign window — so spreading it out helps ensure you’re reaching the right players.
Resources
FAQs
If I apply personalized targeting such as new players, lapsed players, recent players or genre targeting, who will see my ads?
Not everyone on Roblox sees personalized ads.
- Users under 18 and anyone who’s opted out of data sharing won’t see personalized ads (Roblox Ad Preferences)
- If you use audience targeting (New Users, Recent Users, Lapsed Users) or advanced options like genre or gender, your ads will only show to users 18+ who have opted in to personalized advertising.
Want to reach all Ads eligible users? Stick with campaigns that only use your goal and contextual targeting (device type and location). Skip the audience and demographic filters, or run 2 campaigns, one with targeting, and one without.
I’m seeing high costs in the new Ads Manager. Why can’t I set a budget cap?
The new Ads Manager focuses on spending your full budget to reach your goal. We removed bid caps because they often prevented campaigns from spending their full budget, which was a common source of creator frustration.
Your cost-per-play naturally increases when you use audience targeting (particularly things like geo targeting in specific markets), since you’re reaching fewer potential players. If you’re targeting specific audiences, start with a small daily budget for 3-7 days to test performance, then gradually increase it to find what works best.
You can also lower your cost-per-play by creating more engaging thumbnails that get more clicks!
to your own opinion
