Search ads can supplement the reach you get already, and can also give you an opportunity to reach more specific people based on their intent and keyword. For search ads, you will only be charged for plays that happen as a result clicking on that ad.
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Our ads system prioritizes ads that are most relevant to a user and their search query. If an experience adds tags that aren’t related to the experience, it’s not a great user experience, it isn’t relevant, and as a result likely won’t be prioritized as highly as more relevant experiences.
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right as this update came out I bought a search ad and out of the 15 ad credits I put into it it only spent 0.96. what the heck. Im assuming this is because its not rolled out to all users but whats the point in even letting people use it if it doesn’t even work.
I would have liked to put that 15 ad credits into another ad but I couldn’t because it was in this ad doing nothing at all and now I have to wait for it to process for me to get it back
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Are placements in search that are paid for with this listed as such? Multiple searches I often do to keep an eye on my games have changed drastically in the last couple of days including multiple games with noone playing them right at or near the top, but there is no mention of their placements being sponsored.
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Seems like these new ads are unfortunately worse than normal sponsored ads 
we’re seeing a CPM (cost per million impressions) thats about 10x higher than normal sponsored ads, while CTR is about ~5x better. So pretty much the same thing other people in the thread have already said - the new search ads are only about half as good.
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I don’t think I would assume that - as it depends on the settings.
I spent the same number of credits over 2 days as a sponsored ad. At only half way through the time I’ve almost hit the same number of plays as the sponsored ad did over the full two days. So in my case it’s almost twice as effective in getting plays.
I think it will depend drastically on picking the right search terms.
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I dont expect us to really be able to improve our search ad stats though, here’s my reasoning:
- The stats we’re seeing from search ads are actually a few % above what our normal search stats in Analytics → Explore → User Impression CTR are. Usually the normal sponsors on Home do worse for stats. I interpret this as already having pretty good search ad keywords (better targeting than the average user search).
- It’s a tycoon game, and our search terms include keywords like “tycoon”, which I assume are some of the highest volume search keywords overall. Doubling the volume by changing keywords seems unlikely.
We’ll keep experimenting though and see if we can optimize enough for these to be better than normal sponsors.
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This is the maximum bid per play, not the minimum.
I have tested out these new Search Ads and they are way more effective if your search term targets a scope people search for, but not many people advertise for.
I have gotten 0.01 CPP more most of my terms using these new Search Ads.
While I kinda don’t know why the Maximum bid isn’t put on the same level as sponsored ads, I think with the way the system behaves, this is just fine.
Edit:
I think the UI and UX of the Ads Manager should improve:
- Allowing to clone previous Campaigns.
- Showing options on which stats to show (CPP often won’t show up on too small monitors since it’s all the way on the right + having so much numbers on screen can make it hard to analyse)
- CPP should give extra decimals, since 0.24 Ad Credit spent with 16 plays shows up as 0.01 CPP while it is actually 50% higher: 0.015
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You’ll def need to play more with the terms. I’m getting almost 10% CTR and a 1.73% play per click. Think wider than just using “tycoon” if your game is a tycoon. Think about what makes your game unique.
For example, if it has options for playing with others, add multiplayer, PVP etc. If it’s magic, add magic, wizards, spells, etc.
Obviously we’re limited by what’s being searched for, but I spent about 30 minutes playing with all different terms to find 10 that would be unique and surface my experience when other games won’t.
SEO is a bit of an art.
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We are aware of this. It is not our first time running sponsors and “tycoon” was not the only keyword we used. It was an example of one that should have a high volume of searches. 10% CTR sounds great, but less than 2% play rate sounds low. Here is our run for search ads over 3 days:
Search ads only managed to spend about a quarter of the total budget before finishing, and considering the CPP was <=0.01 ad credit, well below the minimum limit for setting up a search ad, something is wrong with this search volume. This is not a crazy amount of ad credits either.
Ads need to scale to medium/large scale games. If the maximum amount of players we can get out of a search ad is less than 1% of our daily new players from other sources, even when maxing out the search budget, it’s just not worth it to run search ads.
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Ad Credit spent: 52.35
Plays: 2810
52.35 / 2810 = 0.01862989323
Which means your CPP is actually closer to 0.0186, however Roblox rounds CPP down to 0.01 for some reason.
I have an average play rate around 3%, however my CPP is closer to 0.01
This is mainly because my search terms aren’t advertised a lot for and the CTR for some search terms is as high as 28.90%, while play rate for some of my terms are as high as 13.57%.
This isn’t for all terms, but those are the results of my most successful term.
On the other end, some terms have a play rate as low as 0.3%.
Edit:
I wonder if Roblox is ever going to allow for ads cheaper than 0.01 in their internal bidding system. If your ad has no competitiveness with other ads or has a very high play rate, it would be beneficial to developers for it to become cheaper, but as of now all I can see is that it has a lower cap of 0.01
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I would love it if Roblox rolled out some kind of feature that displays the Search Volume and Average Winning Bid per search term. Then it would be easier for developers to determine the competitiveness per search term.
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my bad at wording, I meant minimum max bid we can input, because I prefer to get less impressions as long as I can spend less credits (now I can’t be sure how much I spend between 0.01 and 0.02 per play, kinda sucks when I want some players without overpaying for them)
these ads are great for getting players who would be interested in your game but I still believe roblox ad system should allow setting your max bids under 0.01 for multiple reasons, though I agree with the UI improvement ideas
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you also have to understand that since your reaching an audience that is actively searching for your type of game or the type of game you put keywords for then they are more likely to spend more time in game and come back more often and spend more which makes search ads worth it.
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The system works with ad bidding.
The ad bidding system automatically sells ad spots to advertisers with the highest Cost Per Mille (CPM) which is the cost per 1000 impressions. If there is a small amount of advertisers on the same search term and if users are likely to play your game, the revenue Roblox creates per impression will be higher, therefore prioritising your ad and letting you pay less.
For now I could suggest you a few things to lower your Cost Per Play:
Use good search terms:
Users who search for something should want to click on your game; use the right audience.
Use a search term there is much search volume for, but not much advertisers use (for now I think you need to guess this)
Make any starting steps look appealing:
Use a nice game icon and title for the click.
Use nice (a) thumbnail(s) and a description for the play.
(Also make sure people have a good first time experience in your game, but that is unrelated to Cost Per Play as that is after clicking play)
Split up separate search terms into different Search Ads to view the effectiveness, rather than adding 10 different terms under one Search Ad
View the stats in the Ads Manager per search ad, you should name the search ad according to the key word it uses
I can give an example for search terms for a game I work on:
This game is a game targeted towards people who like anthropomorphic animals, character customisation, roleplaying, socialising, using Roblox voicechat, etc.
After setting up a bunch of search terms that fit the description, I run some test ads, after which I can see the results of for some of the most effective ones here:
If the users are likely to click on your ad and play the game, and not much advertisers use your search ad term, your Cost Per Play will be lower.
In most of my terms here, I actually paid just the minimum of 0.01 ad credit.
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Good idea, BUT I don’t understand how games with 0 similarity should appear on the first two slots on mobile in this new section. I looked up tycoon 10+ times and reloaded and I saw pet simulator 99 and my restaurant as the only results. Only 2/10 times did I find any other games. The game should require to have some of the next that is in the tag in the title to even be a selection. “simulators” should NOT BE able to be show up when you search tycoon. Hopefully this changes…
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Sure, but how useful are the players we get, considering the context of the game and its size? Even if the players we get from search ads pay some ridiculous amount like 5x more, the maximum volume we can get is 1% of home rec and other sources. This is a 1.05x change overall for the game, not a meaningful change to our stats. And the most important part of all:
Other sources of players are not sources we pay for, they are free, search ads / sponsored ads are not.
If the volume from search ads does not change, they will not be worth running for anything but very small / new games, period. We’re much better off spending the same amount of time / money on something like new game icons. Those at least have a visible and lasting impact on the game when they do well.
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What determines if the search term is “most relevant to a user and their search query”? In other words, if I advertise an obby with a racing search term, how does the ad system determine this difference?
Is it based on how many users using the search term click / pass on the ad? If so, isn’t there concern that even if your search term is relevant to your experience, if enough people don’t click your experience, the ads manager will deprioritize it? This would mean the interest in your experience effects how prominent your ad is, rather than the amount you pay for (should be the latter)
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I want to remove my credit card as a payment method. But I can’t, there appears to be no way. I don’t want this to be the default payment method. I don’t want to accidentally lose hundreds of dollars again because I thought I was using ad credit when in fact I wasn’t. Bunch of crooks. Let me remove my card!! Stop holding it hostage.
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To anyone that has tried these new ads. Is it worth the money?
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