More Ads Manager Upgrades!

Updates Announcements
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Hi Creators,

We’re back with more Ads Manager upgrades, as we continue making advertising a growth channel for any experience on Roblox and a key part of your growth lifecycle.

Our new Ads Manager flow, released in March, is driving more high quality plays at a lower cost for creators. As of early May, we’ve seen a 44% decrease in cost per play (CPP) and an 89% improvement in quality play-through rate (qPTR) for campaigns running through the new flow. We are also seeing creators enjoy our new custom thumbnails, with 2 in 5 campaigns already using 2 or more creatives. This is reflected in usage, 68% of new campaigns for Ads Manager are being run through the new flow.

With today’s release, we’re further improving the new Ads Manager flow to help you with retention and re-engagement, while also adding targeting and improved pacing.

Let’s jump in.

Reduce churn with new Drive Retention and Reactivate Users objectives

Have you looked at Creator Analytics lately and wondered how you can improve your retention rates? Our new Drive Retention and Reactivate Users objectives, available in the new Ads Manager flow, can help you bring more users back to your game, increasing session frequency and lifetime value (LTV).

As a reminder, we built the new Ads Manager flow with a simplified, goal-first set up. In March, we launched with a single objective, to maximize plays, that helps you get the most plays at the lowest cost. These new additional objectives will allow you to get more strategic and tactical with your ads.

The Drive Retention objective will focus on turning visitors into regulars, reaching those who played an experience for the first time in the last 30 days. This objective is a great complement to in-game mechanics you’re creating to build habits and encourage repeat play.

The Reactivate Users objective focuses on re-igniting the spark in lapsed regulars, reaching users who used to play, but haven’t returned to your game in the last 30 to 180 days. This is perfect if you’ve just published a game update, or are releasing some bug fixes that you feel may have caused users to churn, and might need a nudge to become regulars again.

Both tactics will also enable you to have your game show up twice on the homepage, in both continue and the sponsored section. This increases the visibility of your game to key users, who are most likely to return.

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New targeting controls to add guardrails for your campaign

The new simplified Ads Manager flow is built to take a lot of the guesswork out of campaign set up, and help deliver the best results for you. Our algorithms are built to find the users most likely to engage and enjoy your experience.

However, we know that some targeting is important. That’s why creators can now add targeting parameters to campaigns set up in the new flow, enabling ads to only be shown to users by geo and platform. This advanced targeting functionality lets you benefit from our AI optimization while providing you with more control, and can be found in the advanced settings section of set up. Unless you have a clear need for geo or platform, we recommend running without targeting, as our algorithms will be able to find the right users for your experience.

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Grow steady traffic with improved pacing

Finally, we’ve heard you need steadier budget delivery when you run your campaigns. We know that smoother, reliable delivery can drive more predictable growth, and also enables your new users to benefit from others playing new experiences at the same time.

With this release, we have rebuilt our pacing engine to be time-aware, adaptive, and to focus on more uniform delivery. Since quietly rolling it out a few weeks ago, we’ve seen an 80% decrease in pacing spikes for most campaigns.

Simpler set up

We’ve reduced friction in the campaign setup flow so you can see the value of ads before committing. You can now fully build your campaign — including previewing estimated reach and exploring ad tools — and only add a payment method at the final step.

What’s next

  • Upcoming ads webinar: We’re excited to announce that we’re running a webinar on June 5 at 10am PDT to share more about the growth in Ads Manager, and answer your questions directly. Sign up here, and please add topics you’d want to hear about in the comments below.

  • More placements and objectives: We are looking to bring our Sponsored format to more placements and surfaces, including Search, and add more objectives such as Reach New Users to expand the use cases Ads Manager can help you with.

  • More resources: We’ll be providing more resources via Creator Hub to help you upskill on ads, or have a refresher if it’s been a while.

As always, we are actively listening, and want to continue to build with your valuable feedback in mind. If you don’t see your feature in this launch, let us know. Thanks!

FAQs

If I run two campaigns with different objectives at the same time, how will they work together?

  • Ad campaigns with different objectives will work in a complementary way to grow your experiences. For example, a Maximize Plays campaign will focus on getting you the most high-quality plays, at the lowest cost. Now, you could add a second campaign with a Drive Retention objective, to bring them back to your experience within 30 days.

    Will you have more advanced targeting parameters such as age, gender, and more soon?
    Not at this time. Our new ad system is built to reach the users most likely to engage and enjoy your experience, and additional targeting can harm performance.

    If you would like to A/B test performance, you can still access targeting parameters in the Ads Manager classic flow to compare.

Why is the minimum spend to set up 10 ad credits (5 ad credits per day, with a 2 day minimum)?

  • Ads Manager’s adaptive models (and other ad systems) require a minimum amount of budget and time to learn who is most likely to respond to your ads and spend time in your experience in order to drive strong performance. Ad campaigns below this threshold are less likely to drive strong performance, and we have found lead to developer disappointment.

    As a general rule, we recommend giving your campaigns time to optimize, rather than making rapid changes in the first few hours of activation.

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Wait if I use the “Drive Retention” option on a dead game would the ad flop since it can’t find players who played in the last 30 days?

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What happens if you would choose the “Reactivate Users” option on a new game with like 10 visits before the sponsor :thinking: ? Overall this seems like a great update

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@Puma_incredible - good question! If you don’t have new users coming into your game to retain, we wouldn’t recommend using the Drive Retention objective. In the UI, you should see proactive warnings if your audience size is too small.

Instead, consider using the Reactivate Users objective — it’s designed to help bring back lapsed players (which is especially effective if you’ve made game updates or new content drops).

With these new updates, most creators are seeing significant performance improvements too!

Happy to share more info, if helpful!

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Heyo, really excited to see how these new objectives play out, some great work being done here!

I hate to ask the same question again from the other post but I’m still genuinely curious and believe this knowledge could be of some interest to all of us;

Could we have some insight as to how the recommended amount of credits for a daily budget is calculated and what results we could expect to see on an average CTR? I’m a little confused as 8 credits per day (which is what is recommended, at least for me) seems low for a launch week

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@13_5G - thanks for taking the time to ask us : ) If your game only has around 10 visits, the Reactivate Users audience will likely be too small to serve ads effectively. You’ll see a warning in the UI if that’s the case.

For newer games, we recommend starting with a Maximize Plays objective to grow your player base first — then you can come back and run Reactivate campaigns once you’ve built up more lapsed players.

You can also run Maximize Plays and Drive Retention and/or Reactivate Users at the same time to try out that strategy!

Plus, with these new updates, most creators are seeing significant performance improvements too!

And glad to hear you’re liking the update! :raised_hands:

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Overall the update seems great!

Yet you still didn’t answer @Puma_incredible’s question, more like warned us not to try it out.
But if I ignore all of the warnings, and still go for the “Drive Retention” option on a dead game, what will happen?

Maybe the ads won’t be shown until new players join the game, which would mean that ads bought via “Drive Retention” option could be added to something like ad queue which would be active until all of the ads bought were shown (so this way, I could buy 1000 “Drive Retention” ads for my dead game, it might take ~1year to show them all, and the player that eventually plays my dead game would get my game’s ads a lot (as he’s the only possible audience for the “drive retention” ad)

OR the ads would just go to waste if not shown in a week or so.

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Seems really cool how you can pick how your game is advertised! Nice job! :blush:

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@GnuSnuX - thanks for calling out!

It really depends on your audience size, and you’ll see proactive warnings on the UI if your audience size is too small. We’ve also added proactive informational banners to help flag when your audience might be too small.

If your Drive Retention audience is zero (i.e., no one has played your game in the past 30 days), then your ad won’t be shown and you won’t be charged. So in the case of a completely “dead game,” the system simply won’t serve the ad.

That said, if you’re trying to bring players back to a dead or dormant game, the Reactivate Users objective is a better fit — it targets players who previously engaged but have since churned out.

If you do have an audience, then your Drive Retention ads will serve to that group. We recommend testing it out — start with the recommended or a smaller budget, then scale up if you’re seeing strong performance.

Most creators are seeing very strong performance so far!

Happy to share any other info!

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That’s a really great update!
I spent over 2+ million Robux on ads, and I was waiting for new updates! :smiley:
Thanks.

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Will be giving the reactivate players ad a go, I’m thinking the cost per play is going to be astronomically higher than the maximize plays ads.:scream_cat:

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For most of my time on Roblox, I have created communities centered around military. That being real or sci-fi. I have done both. The old way to get your group members was to use group ads, and that way, your community could get hundreds, and even thousands of members. The most active military groups number in the thousands of members. That is however not possible to reach with sponsored ads, as they advertise games rather than groups, and military and hotel groups don’t appeal to large swaths of the Roblox player base. Many roleplay groups are niche. I would like to see in the webinar discussion about sponsored group ads , so that us niche group genre owners have a way to grow again. I have tried sponsored ads for a military group game, and nobody joins the group. They stay in game for a little bit and then leave. I was unable to raise my member count above 50 members, and all those members were friends and people I recruited through discord and the game Plaza Connect. The images I have attached are group recruitment discords where people go to advertise their groups. Issue is that most are there to advertise, and not to join. Many of these groups advertising are not gaining any members and can definitely use the help of sponsored group ads. The interest in there and the groups want to grow, but are not provided the means to. We need a way to get players to join the group rather than the game.

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My game died instantly around December 1st and my big revival-styled update is on May 31st. How much will that affect my campaign? — Does Reactivate Users use the start date of the Sponsored Ad or the current date?

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I made 2 videos about using the old ads manager over a year ago and together they got 50k+ views. If that doesn’t tell you how confusing some people found the old ads manager idk what will.

These new changes are so good and i’m personably really excited to test them out and see how they’ll compare to the old system

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Try to make your update before 180 to be in the safe zone like 175 and 178 is perfect

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Has this update looked into the bot-like results from the revamped Ads Manager? Last time I tried to use it, it resulted in mostly bot-like players joining and instantly leaving.
I’d like to be positive and think these were just inattentive children, but it was in MASS amounts, which really leads me to believe it actually were bots.
Ever since that I’ve been afraid to use the new manager, unless that problem has been fixed?

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hi i see you are from roblox staff, when does roblox expect to make it cheaper to buy ad credits but make them less value so 10 times cheaper is 0.1 ad credit but times 10 to make it easy to read
so instead of buying 10 you buy 100 for the same price but they would still be worth the same

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Something tells me you’re not content with the pricing of the ad credits, which does seem at least decently problematic with how the system tends to be erratic with distribution

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well i mean the fact that you have to spend like 2.5k i think is maybe a bit overpriced for most people sadly including me

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