Amongst trying to get used to roblox’s (quite frankly, awfully convoluted) new ad campaign system, I notice they have the “In experience portal” ad option available now - the one that puts ads into people’s games that let them just go through it and join your game.
Is this option effective? Has anyone used it yet to the point where they can compare typical impressions and visits VS sponsors? It seems neat, but I don’t want to waste my time on something that has generally lower performance by most people’s attempts.
Let me know what your experiences are on the two ad types compared to each-other, and overall any other thoughts you have on them.
Edit 2:
I’ve expressed my overall complaints with the new ad system here as well for anyone interested;
Please read this thread for a more nuanced roundup of roblox’s advertisement woes.
lmao i threw an ad portal on my recent sponsor ad just to try and answer my own question;
It’s weird “max bid” setting had a minimum of 0.20 per play - Way higher than Sponsor.
Why? Isn’t a cost per play… per play? If it takes more money to get a play, why is it useful?
Just another way the Cost per play/max bid option seems arbitrary and not well explained.
It’s been 2-3+ hours and the stats on it haven’t loaded yet. It’s active, running, not pending review… But it’s taking longer than sponsored ads just to even show me if it’s doing anything. Concerning.
Update: It spiked a TON. Despite this being a 2-day campaign, the ‘Spend’ section reports using the vast majority of the allotted funds. I got a spike from 200 players to 1000… for a whopping 15 minutes around 4-5pm. It went from an extremely slow start to this unusual “Eat all of the money and get 5 minutes of fame” strat, where I nearly had a heart attack from the player count… That then immediately dissipated, to the point where the major player spike was effectively useless due to an extremely unusual low play time. I have literally no idea what to interpret from that so far, as I have no idea what just happened… I’m basically in awe of a huge spike in players that disappeared as fast as it came. Does anyone know what could have even remotely caused this behavior? Is this normal?
As far as I can tell, despite there being 24 hours or so left in the ad spending, it has already maxed out on the spend amount/budget…
Now the ad statistics have broken. My sponsor ad that said it had 900+ plays on it yesterday… now says it has 7 plays. What does that even mean? Where did they go???
Does it calculate per day? In which case where can I see the prior day? And why is it 7 today?
Before and after of the Sponsor ad. This ‘after’ is after the “Experience Portal” ad gave me 750 seemingly fake/bot accounts that joined my game for a whopping minute and then left, eating up my entire ad budget for a 2 day campaign within a day.
I feel genuinely scammed. All I wanted to do was try out the new Experience Portal ad method. Nowhere did it tell me it’d destroy my other ads by wasting all of my money.
This is what the Experience Portal ad went to after doing nothing for half a day, then wasting all of my money and going back to doing nothing.
It’s very misleading because it basically ate all of that money (200 whole ad credits) within just a matter of minutes, boasted about how cool it’s 37% playrate was, and then immediately stopped providing anything of value, sucking away valuable resources seemingly from the other ad.
So what? Should I have ran A SEPARATE campaign for this? I thought the whole point of a campaign was it let you handle all of your ads together. Clearly that isn’t what I want to do though, as the ads are so wildly inconsistent with how they perform one ad seemingly destroys another ad if they’re in the same campaign…
Or at least that’s my thoughts. Again this is all so poorly explained I have no idea. Does anyone have any idea? No replies so i’d assume not, realistically. And I don’t blame you.
Lol. Also the cpp of the Portal ad, which required a minimum of 0.20, actually has a 0.08CPP.
Did the whole ad system just explode on me? Like is it all bugged?
Exact same thing happened to me, I wanted to test out the in-experience portals to see how it works. Around 6hrs after the campaign was active it spiked, got to around 800 players then almost instantly dropped back down to 400 (which is what the game was previously). I could only see the 800 players by going to the performance section in the analytics. So something is defo wrong with it atm, either there’s someone botting or the system is just bad. Either way I wouldn’t use this for now until some heavy improvements are made.
Yeah it is extremely unusual. Roblox staff hasn’t really been responding to much of the criticism on the main thread about the Ad Manager, I ended up making this thread just to ask a question but now I see that the question goes far, far deeper than I can imagine…
These definitely were not ‘real’ players as far as I can tell. The fact it’s happened to more than one person almost certainly confirms it has to be some sort of major issue - No players cycle through that fast, period, no matter what source usually. I wonder if there’s just one big mega game with hundreds of bots pouring through ads? Could be very profitable for them… Not for us though.
I feel like this particular problem warrants contacting someone specific to ask what the deal is, and if it’s a bug or bigger problem - Does anyone know what forum-facing staff would know the most about this sort of thing? I know there are a lot of forum using roblox representatives, but I never know how to summon them when they’re needed, aha…
Also, somewhat offtopic, but I ran another campaign, with the settings better (daily budget limit, more targeted audience, etc) - And it has been 4 hours since it’s schedule start time, with no statistics having popped up yet, no budget spent etc, just the same blank info as an inactive ad.
I know it takes a while sometimes, but normally not 4 hours…
Yeah I do believe there’s a few groups just botting the portals somehow, it’s also weird how you never actually see a portal displayed with games that have one, it’s always the placeholder image.
I have no clue how to contact a staff but I feel like they should really look into it if they aren’t already as it kinda just makes them useless currently and I’m sure a lot of people have wasted tons of money on it.
Also I have that issue too where it takes a while to load, 4 hours is bit crazy but roblox did go down earlier today so maybe that’s effecting that, but I’m sure they’ll show up soon
Ah well if they went down briefly I won’t sweat it.
The slow part, that is… The part where I lost 200 ad credits to a (potential) botting situation?
That part I’m sweating.
I’ve had unusual situations with advertisements before and gotten reimbursed, but this seems like something I’d have a hard time getting anywhere with, without a proper conversation with someone.
What’s really weird is that my game has noticed an uncanny decrease in players since experimenting with the ads. As if the glitchyness of the Plays disappearing and the Experience Portal botting incident have wrecked it’s algorithm in some way. I hope this does not continue.
Yeah that’s most likely the case, using portals in it’s current state will ruin your stats. It doesn’t look good with 500+ players join and immediately leave. Roblox should really look into this, maybe temporarily disable the portals until they find a way to fix it.
Yeah I agree, however people who do want to try out the portals should know it’s not worth it in it’s current state. I don’t know 100% but it does feel like it’s being botted, just due to random spike in players for a couple seconds
Yeah I’ll look into how I can express this issue to staff, the more I think about it the more it seems like obviously something very bad has happened that is putting a negative effect on my game even after the problem has happened
I feel that’s what makes portals worth it, knowing your game could show up in bigger games. However in this case there’s almost definitely a botting situation, because my game for example went from 400~ spiked to 800 for a couple seconds and back down to 400. During the spike the portal was completed after being active for around 6 hours.
It’s just a strange system and what proves this point a bit more, if you go into any game that has these portals in place it’s always a placeholder, not once have I seen an actual game being displayed. Though if this is intentional then I would avoid using portals as they just seem to hurt the games stats
Nah we need to understand the difference between “bigger games” and “corporate shovelware”. I don’t think Donald is implying that larger genuine games will lead to higher botting rates - But that on average, real developers likely don’t want to drive players away from their game via portals, so the average game that does have portals tends to be very corporate - If you haven’t seen the “Walmart world” experience, consider yourself blessed. Realistically these games exists as, themselves, advertisements, so if Donald is right, and mega-corporation experiences are a large source of plays from Ad Portals, it is unlikely they’d ever output anything other than bots and the lowest quality of playerbase.
I wish I considered this factor before, as clearly I’m not the only one with this botting problem… Seems ridiculous that someone above in roblox staff hasn’t noticed this yet, maybe it should be filed as a literal bug report of feature request even
