Unfortunately so far I have been unable to get any dev relations responses to this weird botting problem.
Hi, can you share what amounts you spend on sponsored ads to see some increase in player clicks you your game? @Maxwell_Edison @DonaldDuck5150 @MuPower @TheDCraft ?
Thanks
My playrate is above 60% with portal ads, I feel like thats highly unusual. I highly doubt 60% of the players that see a portal ad will actually enter It. This proves more that the portal ads are being botted, does anyone else also have a unusually high playrate?
Yep, most likely botted. As talked about in my various posts on the subject at least.
Did your ‘players’ from portal ads also disappear near-instantly? Staying for but a brief second?
Yeah, they join and stay afk for 10 second and leave.
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I think I figured out the “botting”. Most people who play Roblox are drooling children on iPads. They accidentally wander into the Portal Ad and realize they’re not in Adopt Me anymore, so they leave. Your Ad Credits get used up and they forget they ever played your game.
Does Roblox not see this?
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Unfortunate, it does seem very much so like a botting issue to me.
I’ve tried messaging a lot of people marked ‘Dev relations’ on the forums, even some I’ve had interactions with previously, but have gotten no comment.
was about to put a loooot of money into portal ads, glad I didn’t
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lolllll rip roblox’s revenue 
Yep tried it again recently with another $50 portal and game went from ~30 players to 400 and now it’s hovering around ~50 players (in a matter of seconds). For anyone reading this and is considering using portals I would highly recommend sticking to sponsoring for now as that is still is the best way to advertise your game.
Also if want to try it out, I would recommend doing it on a test game since this will ruin your stats especially for smaller games.
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We NEED to find a way to get this into the eyes of staff/dev relations. Unfortunately I don’t think it qualifies as a bug report, so I’m not really sure where this could be posted or who this could be sent to. I’ve messaged about a dozen dev relations people at this point and no response still.
Yeah I’ve tried sending a support ticket but didn’t really lead to much. I feel like staff are aware of this issue and are actively working on it behind the scenes but just not very transparent about it. There’s no real way of telling if this getting into the eyes of staff since they may not be at liberty to speak on it. The most we can do is wait and hope it is being worked on or at least given a reason for the current portal behaviour.
I’m actually quite irritated, I spent $20 just for my game to go from 300 players up to 800 for around 5 minuets and then it returned to the regular count, did it just ruin my games average playtime? This is literally absurd. They need to fix this because it eats up the budget before it’s even over? I genuinely dislike the entire Ad Manager system and they need to go back to the old one.
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Yep for me when I used it I had around 400 players, it spiked to around 800 I believe and dropped instantly. After that my game just kept decreasing and now gets ~30 players and one of my other games I tested on now gets 0 players too.
I also dislike this ad manager system, I feel like it’s way more tedious and you need to do a lot more research and testing. I’m sure we’ll eventually get used to it but right now it’s just demotivating to use. I recently used $500 and had an ad running each day for 5 days ($100 each day) and once it was over it only used $50 which I find quite annoying as I don’t really want to spend a ton on bidding.
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I had a sponsor ad last week that had a good 5 minutes of players. Game was originally at 250+ and rose to 1,300 within 1 minute. After those five minutes the game died back to 250 in 10 minutes. For reference, I had my max bid at .20 and put 400 credits to last for a whole day. The sponsor really didn’t bring a single player after the spike had occurred. Have also experiences this 4 times with another tycoon game.
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That’s not good, if this problem can happen to sponsored ads too…
I just ran a sponsor. It was getting consistent visits and impressions for a while but it stopped a few hours ago. Impressions haven’t risen at all leading me to believe Roblox just stopped serving my ad. I’m guessing it’s because the ad already spent all of its funds, which doesn’t make any sense since I wanted it to run for a whole day, not a half day.
I don’t know how Roblox thinks this new system is any good; I want my ad to run for the whole day, yet it doesn’t understand that and spends itself out in a few hours. I would much rather have a consistent stream of players than a massive spike like mentioned in the above posts. My first experience using the ads manager has so far been incredibly disappointing… and not to go off-topic, but whoever designed the UI for the ads manager needs to be fired.
The thing I liked about the old sponsor system was that you got exactly the amount of time you paid for. The fact that they’ve practically removed that option unless is annoying to say the least, since it means any ads I purchase have a chance of spending all their funds immediately and dying almost as soon as they begun. This ads system is leaving a really bad taste in my mouth.
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Yeah this system is a lot less consistent. For example I ran an $20 ad with the lowest bidding it and it only used ~$1 the whole day and I got refunded the rest. I did another one the next day everything was the same and it used $3. Ofc this is mainly due to the bidding as there may have been more people sponsoring that day and you were just getting outbid, but now you are kinda either forced to pay more to see results quicker or you’ll have to advertise for a couple days or weeks to even use up the $20.
Though thing is with spending more money is I spent $400 on an advertisement which got 1.3M impressions, but after it ended I started a $20 which got 200k+ impressions, which just doesn’t even make sense. Since if I was to do $400 worth of $20 ads I would in theory get 4M impressions (I did test this and I was consistently getting 200k+ impressions with $20)
I think if people are going to sponsor then make sure not go straight into big sponsors, start by doing some small ones to see how they perform. I feel like this system may be better in terms of how much you spend, with the previous sponsor system I feel like I was spending a lot more (but it was consistent) compared to now where I only run the $20. Ofc this is just from my experience and so far low $ ads have been working, however recently they’ve just not been spending the full amount spending <$3 a day.
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Hi,
Thanks all for sharing the details, it is good to hear how others are doing on these marketing techniques.
TheDCraft, what does your sponsoring image look like?
Also did you get any repeat players after the sponsoring stopped?
What about the stats for the average play time during when it was spnsored?
Thanks
For testing I used the same icon, which had 1.8% CTR to keep the results somewhat consistent. So the $400 and the couple $20 ads were testing with the same icon.
As for players after sponsoring stopped the game kept a consistent player base and due to our game having good stats the algorithm boosted our game to 1.4k ccu however it didn’t last long as the game just started dropping in players everyday which was weird since we still had good stats. Could be due to all the algorithm changes.
Our average playtime was 40m which is very good and now is around 27m. Our game now holds around 100 players and during the day sometimes spikes to ~200 however I haven’t been sponsoring the last couple of days as everytime I do I feel like I lose more players.
If anyone has any tips on the best way to sponsor please let me know, I would love to try it out and see if it makes a difference.
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