Hi Creators,
We are excited to launch several long requested upgrades to Roblox Ads Manager that place your growth at the center of your experience.
We believe that advertising should act as a complementary discovery and engagement channel for any experience on Roblox, and we expect these improvements to improve the engagement and relevance of your ads — meaning more high quality users will join and engage with your creations. Whether you’re launching your first experience from scratch or trying to take an experience to the next level — we want Ads Manager to be for you.
Let’s jump into the details below.
More Engaging Ad Creative and Custom Thumbnails
Impactful advertising needs great creative assets. With this launch, Sponsored Experiences will shift from using the smaller 1:1 ad unit, to the 16:9 ad unit that has been popularized elsewhere on the home page. We have seen this ad format improve play through rate (PTR) by up to 40% in the Sponsored Sort on Home.
One of our most requested features is here: in the new Ads Manager experience: you can now upload and manage custom 16:9 thumbnails for your campaigns! At launch, each campaign will support up to 5 thumbnails, which can be new, or previously uploaded from the Creator Dashboard. You will be able to understand which thumbnail is delivering the most impact in your reporting, leading to more effective ad strategies. Some helpful best practices for an engaging thumbnail can be found here.
Initially, these thumbnails will serve evenly to users across Roblox, and you’ll be able to see which creative is driving the best engagement. Over time, our ads system will start to prioritize showing the most engaging thumbnail to each user group, ensuring users see the most relevant creative.
For our creative specs, or more information about how to upload creatives, see here.
Simplified Campaign Creation
Ads are only valuable if they help achieve your goals, and you shouldn’t have to be an expert to make it happen!
We’ve built the new Ads Manager with a simple three step flow: just select your goal, budget, and creative and Roblox will take care of the rest.
At launch, you will be able to optimize towards maximizing plays, which will help you get the most plays at the lowest cost. This goal will be particularly useful in getting your new experiences in front of users right on launch, helping spur engagement and playtime.
Over the coming months, we’re planning to launch more goals for your ad campaigns, such as driving retention and maximizing revenue, which will help you start to use ads at different stages of the user journey. We’re also adding more advanced targeting functionality, to set guardrails around who sees your ads, such as age, location, gender, genre, and device.
Smarter Performance Algorithms and Models
We know any dollar you spend on ads is important, so we want to make it go as far as we can. That’s why our new systems are designed to find you the best users.
Our new Ads Manager is built with smarter performance algorithms that optimize to drive the lowest Cost Per Play (CPP) aligned with your goal. This system will dynamically adjust bids in real-time to maximize ad performance and show your ads to the most relevant users.
We’ve also built in new model-based targeting that optimizes the delivery of your ads. These models analyze things like user engagement patterns, genre preferences, past ad performance, user behavior patterns, and audience demographics (where available) to reach the most relevant and high-value users with your ads. All of these changes are aimed at providing better results and ROI, with less manual effort or expertise required.
Results-Focused Reporting
Understanding the impact your ads are driving shouldn’t be hard. That’s why we’ve built new results-focused reporting. We’ve removed the layers of line-item reporting, and replaced it with a dashboard that shows you how your campaigns are performing against key metrics such as spend, impressions, 7 day playtime, 30 day Robux earnings, and more.
It’s also now much easier to search and filter the reports, and you can also download all displayed data for deeper analysis.
What’s Next
This is just the beginning of major investments in making Ads Manager a stronger foundation for your growth, and we want to hear from you. Here’s a little more about what’s next.
- Upcoming Ads Webinar: In the coming months, we’ll be running a webinar with the VPs of our Advertising Product & Engineering teams to talk about all things ads with the community, covering the ways ads can help grow your experiences, as well as how you can earn more by adding ads to your own experiences. Please add topics you’d want to hear about in that webinar in the comments below, and we’ll share more about timing soon.
- More placements for Sponsored Experiences: While these improvements are raising the bar for Sponsored Ads on Home, we want to bring these formats to more placements and surfaces across Roblox. Expect to hear more on this later in the year.
- More resources: We’ll be providing more resources via Creator Hub, Webinars, and more to help you upskill on ads, or have a refresher if it’s been a while.
We couldn’t have built these capabilities without your valuable feedback, and we want to continue to make improvements throughout the year.
If you don’t see your feature in this launch, let us know! Thank you.
FAQs
How can sponsored ads support organic discovery on Roblox?
- Sponsored ads can amplify the discovery of your experience. By attracting new and relevant users to your experience, ads help the Recommended for You (RFY) algorithm learn which types of users are more likely to engage with and enjoy your content. To understand how your ad campaigns are influencing organic growth, we recommend reviewing your acquisition analytics to track trends in both paid and organic traffic.
I want to target and set bids for my ads and benefit from all of these other features. What should I do?
-
Our algorithms will seek to achieve the lowest Cost per Play (CPP) for your ad campaign objective (Maximize Plays goal on launch, but soon to include other goals like maximizing retention, driving high quality plays, and more), driving optimal performance.
We will be adding some targeting functionality, which will allow you to set guardrails for your ads, such as specific gender, location, age, genre or device requirements. Once set, the system will try to achieve the best possible performance within those parameters.
If you want to continue to set bids and targeting, we recommend using the ‘classic experience’. However, we hope that you will test the new experience to see the results of the new tool yourself.
Does this mean you will eventually sunset the old ‘classic’ Ads Manager?
-
There is no current sunset date for the ‘classic’ Ads Manager at this time.
Our hope is that the new Ads Manager is bigger and better on all dimensions. If it’s not, we want to hear from you.
Can I run Search and Portal ads in the new flow?
- At this time, the new Ads Manager flow is just for Sponsored Experience formats. If you want to run Search or Portal ads, you can leverage the classic flow. We will have more updates coming in the next few months.
I recently uploaded a creative to Ads Manager. Can I use it for my custom thumbnails?
- While creatives from Creator Dashboard or new ones can be used in the new flow for custom thumbnail personalization, creatives recently uploaded to Ads Manager will not be available. We recommend re-uploading via the new flow in this case.
