Ads Manager Updates: Home + Search Combined, New Benchmarks and Sunsetting the Classic Flow

Updates Announcements
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TLDR:

  • Buying Home & Search is Now Unified: New campaigns in the updated Ads Manager can now run across Home and Search placements together, giving you more ways to reach relevant users within a single campaign.
  • Sunsetting the Ads Manager Classic Flow in January: We’re officially deprecating the classic Ads Manager, giving you 6-8 weeks to transition remaining campaigns into January.
  • Quality of Life Improvements: We’ve added small but meaningful improvements to Ads Manager such as a lower purchase minimum, added mobile campaign creation, and CTR reporting, based on your feedback.
  • New Benchmarks: We’re sharing updated performance benchmarks. You can still drive high quality plays for less than $0.01 using our Maximize Plays objective.

Hi Creators,

We’re excited to share the latest range of Ads Manager upgrades. Our goal is for Ads Manager to be a sidekick for your growth goals, helping you reach and retain more users in simple ways at low costs.

One Campaign, Two Placements: Home + Search Combined

We’ve combined Home & Search into a single campaign in the new Ads Manager, making it easier for you to reach relevant users, wherever they are across Roblox.

Campaigns set up in the new Ads Manager will now automatically serve to users in Home & Search, without the need for complex keyword targeting or bidding. This simplification will remove the burden on creators wanting to reach users in Search which often led to overly expensive keywords, or spiky campaign pacing.

Our initial tests saw that Search campaigns in the new flow delivered a 271% increase in quality playthrough (qPTR) over the old, keyword driven model.

Creators will need to set up new campaigns in Ads Manager in order to include Search. In the future, we will add the ability to select specific ad placements per campaign. Search has been removed from the classic Ads Manager flow.

Sunsetting the Classic Ads Manager

The classic Ads Manager will officially sunset in January next year.

We launched the new Ads Manager in March with your feedback in mind and your growth goals at the center. At the core of the new Ads Manager is a focus on simplicity - just put in your goals, budgets, creatives and advanced targeting, and we’ll take care of the rest.

Today nearly all budgets are spent in the new Ads Manager. With the addition of Search to the new flow, we are now ready to fully transition.

You will have 6-8 weeks to transition any final campaigns. We are aiming to have all campaigns transitioned over by the end of January at the latest. You will see notifications in the Ads Manager UI, starting today, to keep you informed of the timeline and direct you to the new flow.

We have heard that some developers want more keyword and audience targeting to reach more specific audiences. We are planning to give creators the ability to do this early next year by adding more functionality within advanced targeting.

If you are currently running a classic campaign, we encourage you to start shifting your remaining budget to the new Ads Manager today to benefit from the combined placements and smarter algorithms.

Improvements to make you more efficient

We’re continuing to invest in improving the new Ads Manager, building on the feedback we hear from you. Here’s a few small updates we’ve made in the last month.

  • Updating the minimum purchase amount: We’ve reduced the purchase minimum for Ad Credits from 10 to 1, enabling you to top up to the 10 Ad Credit campaign minimum.
  • Mobile campaign creation: You can now set up and track campaigns on any mobile device.
  • Click-through Rate (CTR) reporting in Ads Manager: You can now see the CTR of your creatives and campaigns in Ads Manager reporting. This is a great benchmark to assess the performance of your custom thumbnails.
  • Improvements under the hood: We’re continuing to improve our advertising models to enable you to deliver higher quality plays at lower costs. The average quality play through rate (qPTR) of ads has improved by 22.3% over the last 3 months.

Updated benchmarks

Please see our latest benchmarks (as of November 11, 2025), including avg. cost per play (CPP) for the new Acquire New Users objective. Today, you can still drive plays for under $0.01 for maximize plays, and very efficiently for other more targeted objectives.

We provide benchmarks as a guide to what you can expect when you run ad campaigns, but they may vary based on your game and user base size. One way you can improve your cost-per-play is by leveraging custom thumbnails to drive more engaging ads.

Objective Cost-per-play
Maximize Plays $0.0073
Drive Retention $0.0113
Reactivate Users $0.011
Acquire New Users $0.0187

As always, please continue to share your feedback on Ads Manager as we continue to build with you.

Thanks!

Resources

FAQs

Will I be able to target keywords manually in the new flow?

Our new system is designed to place your objectives at the center. We found that manual keyword targeting in the old flow often exhausted budgets on popular keywords while failing to reach high-intent users. Next year, we’ll bring more targeting to the new Ads Manager that will help you reach specific audiences.

Will I get insights into which search terms are helping users convert into my game?

Not at this time, no. It is something we are considering in the future.

Do I need different creatives for Home and Search?

Yes, currently you will need different creative assets.

  • Home: Uses the 16x9 custom thumbnail format. You can upload up to 10 custom thumbnails to run on Home.
  • Search: Uses the 1x1 format, pulling from your default experience thumbnail.

Your campaign will automatically select the right thumbnail based on the format.

We are working to enable custom thumbnails across both placements over time.

Where will Search ads show up?

There is no change to where Search ads appear. They will continue to be shown in the top 2 slots and interleaved every 10 results.

Let us know your feedback on this update in the replies below! Thank you.

Will portals be available in the new Ads Manager flow?

Not at this time, no.

Will I be able to access my old campaign reporting from classic Ads Manager after deprecation?

Yes, all reporting will remain downloadable from the reporting tab.

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This topic was automatically opened after 10 minutes.

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I have some concerns about this change, and I don’t believe it is beneficial to all types of experiences.

I am currently working on an Avatar Shopping experience which would require players with robux that are looking to purchase different outfits. The separate search campaign made it easier to target users who were looking to buy these outfits.

Will there be an option in the future to prioritize search over home? I believe that home campaigns opens up the experience to many players who have no money to spend and the reduced targeting makes finding these users more expensive.

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Sunsetting features = not good

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WHY I WILL NEVER USE THE NEW ADS MANAGER:

I will NEVER use the new ads manager, it delivers 95% worse results than the old ads manager as seen in my post that was just closed without any fixing :down_arrow:

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Why is Roblox so insistent on ruining their own platform?? I truly don’t get it.

Search ads are a staple of advertisement platforms. Google Ads, Bing Ads, YouTube Ads, Amazon Ads, Reddit Ads, Quora Ads, etc. Why? Because it makes much more sense for certain campaigns to target search words instead of a broad audience.

I hate when Roblox assumes the few tests they run are able to be applied to every circumstance and game. It makes absolutely zero sense, especially when we are talking about advertising. And why are we focused on qPTR when the main analytic that should be looked at is engagement? I understand that qPTR is supposed to mean an engaging play, but since Roblox likes to keep secrets we have no idea what an engaging play in their terms really means (2 minutes? 5 minutes? 10 minutes?)

We know our audience, we should be able to target our audience. Since search ads have been sunset, my ad spend has basically doubled across all my games and studios in exchange for low quality visits. The engagement I was getting with Search Ads was better by 2-3x minimum.

Search Ads:

  • Higher Conversion Rate
  • Lower cost per acquisition
  • More high quality traffic
  • Better ROI because we can target users who actually want to play our game
  • Ability to target the users we know want to play our game

This is another case of Roblox trying to “innovate” and change the wheel when really the wheel has been working perfectly fine…

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not roblox just brushing off the age check announcement they made, which is possibly one of the worst updates of all time :sob:

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additionally, this update also sucks! Back-to-back failures!

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Please bring back Search Ads it was the most OP Ads ever. I don’t know why when I use New Ads Manager I only gain like 50-100 CCU, but when I use the old Search Ads I can get like 500 CCU and it is really using the Ad Credit really fast but I really like it since it can gain that much of CCU.

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can you guys not use javascript it doesn’t work on dillo

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@Rockerite - I appreciate you sharing this, and I have two good updates here.

Yes, we will be enabling you to select search as a channel in the new flow. This will be coming early next year.

We also will be launching a new maximize spend objective (announced at RDC) to help reach users most likely to spend within your experience in the new year! Also, here is our RDC DevForum post that has info on the new Maximize Spend use case

Happy to share more info or chat more on this!!

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@sombolian thanks for flagging, and apologies for the delay on your report. We’re digging into this now and will loop back!

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@JoeyHasArrived - we appreciate the detailed post.

firstly, we want to dive into your report of increased costs - could you file a bug report and include your campaign IDs for us to take a look?

secondly, we are adding more targeting functionality to the new Ads Manager flow to give you additional controls, under advanced targeting.

Currently, you can add device and geo. Early next year, we’ll be adding the ability to select channel (e.g., search or home), and more targeting. We’d love to chat more about what you’d like to see here as we build the product - I’ll reach out directly to find time to dive in.

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Shouldn’t you hold off sun-setting anything until you’ve got all the flows and channels in place to replicate what we had / currently have - rather than leaving a gap?

I loved being able to target specific search terms etc, knowing my audience is quite unique, but now have no way to do this (and like others have seen that using the new flow gives me much fewer players//hits).

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Any hope on improvements to the home recommendation algorithm which seems to be the same as maximize plays? Whatever the algorithm deciding which users to show maximize plays campaigns to seems to really suck. I get horrific retention, revenue, and average session times from advertising with maximize plays when comparing those users to acquisitions from the other categories like search, connections, and other. Perhaps my game is just too niche and recommendation is struggling, or onboarding is just not good enough? Either way, waste of $60, I should have ordered food :wink:

Is the only purpose of these campaigns to give the algorithm data to work with on a new game? Because if so, I feel as though this should be explained a bit better instead of just “Grow your experience by driving the most plays at the lowest cost”. It doesn’t seem to actually grow your experience at all if it’s already been out for a while, if anything it just hurt our stats when I ran one for a few days as a test. If this is the case, maybe something like “Accelerate the detection of your experience within the algorithm at the lowest cost” would be more accurate.

Drive retention seems awesome though, I profit on running ads indefinitely, and that is only considering the 30d revenue so even longer term I can imagine these being extremely helpful to an existing game.

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Me who’s broke…

…help

Summary

Broke

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To add on this, the new Ads Manager has failed to bring me any spending players despite the huge increase in number of visits at a cheaper CPP

While that may be beneficial for some game genres, Avatar Shopping games are seeing a huge decline in both ‘Revenue and Average Play Time’ due to most of the new players having no money to spend and leaving the game immediately upon joining

That however wasn’t the case with the Classic Search Ads, I used to get back 110% of the Robux I initially spent on running the campaign, now I’m hemorrhaging money without any meaningful returns

Just for comparison; these are two ads for the same game;
Classic Ads Manager
17.22 Ad Credits → 5,832 :robux_gold: (1,395 Plays)
New Ads Manager
95.77 Ad Credits → 1,011 :robux_gold: (12,370 Plays)

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hey @sombolian — really appreciate you flagging this and laying out the details so clearly.

I took a look at your campaign, and it looks like the targeting settings were extremely narrow. When the audience becomes very small, the system has fewer people to reach, which can drive up costs and reduce performance. If your goal is performance, I recommend trying broader targeting and letting the ML/AI system optimize delivery. But if you have a strict business need to reach a very specific audience, that’s when narrow targeting makes sense — it just comes with those trade-offs.

I’m going to DM you so we can go through your setup together and make sure everything is working as expected.

Thanks again for raising this — I’m here to help!

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Please consider adding a filter to target specifically VC users. Launching a game focused on voice chat is extremely difficult right now because some experiences are built solely for voice chat users. I want to use all of my campaign spend on them - not non-VC users. There is no way to do this, and it leads to a lot of sunk cost, low voice chat ratio, and players that shouldn’t be playing the experience playing the experience and negatively affecting the analytics. This would be very beneficial if we could target between non-VC, VC, and both. Thank you.

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Wanted to add on similarly to others that spending has drastically been reduced. The removal of keyword search ads completely killed any momentum I was building, and after being forced to switch to the new ad manager, my earnings dropped over 90% while spending the same amount per day. Really disappointed in this lapse of judgement. Removing any sort of customization or advanced settings really kills those who optimized their ads.

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