Self-Serve Immersive Ads Creation and Management with Ads Manager [Beta]

Updates Announcements
#1

Hi Creators,

We want to empower you to earn and build sustainable businesses on Roblox.

Last month, we gave creators of experiences another way to earn by inserting Immersive Ads directly into their experience as a potential way to monetize. Today, we are giving you access to an open beta of Ads Manager so you can create and manage Immersive Ads with an easy-to-use self-serve tool.

Immersive Ads are native ads within Roblox experiences that allow creators to reach their audiences at scale in an innovative, engaging, and safe way. People here are keen to explore and discover new experiences. There are 66MM+ people on Roblox every day who are on average visiting ~14 new experiences a month.

By running a campaign with portal ads and/or image ads, you can reach and engage millions of people exploring Roblox experiences every day. People who are actively engaged in a session can see your brand (image ad) or be able to learn about your experience and transport into a specific area within it (portal ad). In our early testing, brand advertisers saw portal ads drive over 90% net new users to their experiences.

Portal Ads

  • Non-clickable static images with a door that teleports users to another experience.

    image11

Image Ads

Use Ads Manager to create Immersive Ads that reach and engage people natively exploring Roblox

Ads Manager enables Immersive Ad creation, management, reporting, and billing. You can pick between image ads to drive awareness and portal ads to drive visits to experiences. Ads are priced on a CPM (cost per mille (thousand) impressions) or a CPT (cost per teleport).

*Metrics and other information displayed in the video are for demonstration purposes only.

We are giving you access to the Ads Manager open beta to receive your valued feedback so we can iterate and improve the product. Opening-up Ads Manager to anyone is a step towards our long-term goal to build Immersive Ads so creators and brands can reach and engage their audience at scale to achieve their business objectives.

Because Ads Manager only accepts payment via credit card, advertisers who wish to spend large budgets using a line of credit should contact our brand partnerships team or visit the Roblox Partner site to contact us.

Getting started with Ads Manager

To get started, you can go directly to the Ads Manager Creator Hub documentation to learn more about how to start creating and managing your Immersive Ads step-by-step. You can also get familiar with our recent announcement introducing our Advertising Standards.

We are just getting started and are ramping up more ad publishers (developers showing ads in their experience) and advertisers in the coming months. We are bringing on brands to the platform so that Immersive Ads can become another way for creators of any size to earn from publishing ads. During the beta, prices may continue to fluctuate as we work on finding the right balance between available ad supply and advertising budgets.

What’s next?

Looking ahead, we have many exciting features we are planning to release:

  • Significant UI improvements including editing, deleting, filtering, and ad creative thumbnails.

  • More ad audiences, reporting, and metrics.

  • Ability to accept larger payments and other methods beyond credit cards.

  • Ability to support complex organizations with many ad accounts, users, and permissioning and access controls.

  • Dynamic and increased spend limits and spending thresholds based on successful payments.

We look forward to hearing your feedback.

FAQ

Click here to view the FAQ!

How do I add Immersive Ads into my experience?

What if I don’t have a credit card to buy ads? Will there be a way to use Robux?

  • Ads Manager does not support Robux as a form of payment to buy Immersive Ads.

How does the ad auction and pricing work?

  • Roblox runs an auction to determine the best ad to show when there is an ad opportunity. Advertisers set the maximum price they are willing to pay as CPM (cost per thousand impressions) or CPT (cost per one teleport). Roblox considers the player and ad information to generate an eCPM (effective cost per thousand impressions) value for each ad in the request. All eligible ads participate in a second price auction. The ad with the highest bid wins the ad slot, but only charges the price of the second highest price, plus one cent.

Can I still create Sponsored Experiences and Sponsored Items?

  • Yes, you can still create Sponsored Ads: Sponsored Experiences and Sponsored Items by navigating to the Creator Dashboard and in the left-hand navigation, select Sponsored Ads. We will be making more improvements to our Sponsored ads system in the coming months and will share more with you.

How long does it take for moderation approval?

  • Each ad submitted to Roblox is human reviewed to ensure it follows Roblox Advertising Standards. Roblox tries to complete moderation within 24 hours for each ad submitted. Ads that do not pass moderation show the status of “rejected.” If you’re curious why your ad got rejected, please check to make sure it complies with all elements of the Advertising Standards here.

How can I choose which experience displays my ads?

  • Advertisers have various expectations around the context in which their ads are placed on Roblox. Because of this, Roblox has curated an initial set of experiences to show ads that are likely to be appropriate for a broad range of advertisers. Eligibility to be shown in more experiences will be gradually opened up throughout 2023. Advertisers cannot choose which specific experience displays your ads, nor can developers select which ads appear in their experiences.

Is any content eligible to be an ad?

Why do I have to be 18 years old to buy ads on this new platform?

  • Because Roblox requires credit card payments for ads purchased in Ads Manager instead of Robux, and Roblox only allows users over the age of 18 to make real-money transactions on the Platform, we are only allowing 18+ users to create Immersive Ad campaigns via Ads Manager.

For Immersive Ads, can advertisers reach users of all ages on Roblox?

  • While Roblox is a platform for all ages, we are designing our Immersive Ads product to reach users ages 13 and older. When a user under the age of 13 comes across an ad unit, rather than displaying the advertising content, the ad unit will display the Roblox logo.

    Publishers can also remove the ad unit(s) altogether for those users by utilizing PolicyService API. For more information, see Removing Ad Units from Ineligible Users.

How does Roblox protect advertisers?

  • At Roblox, we diligently combat ad fraud using advanced detection methods for bots and other fraudulent activities. We ensure advertisers don’t pay for fraudulent traffic and regularly adjust billing and reporting to safeguard their interests.

    Per Roblox’s Advertising Standards, if anyone engages in malicious practices to inflate impressions or teleports, Roblox may deduct Robux from their expected payout or reclaim fraudulently earned Robux. In addition, Roblox may suspend the violator’s experience and/or account.

Will Immersive Ads created through Ads Manager be labeled and disclosed?

  • Yes. Ads that are created in Ads Manager will automatically have the label “Ad.”

What are some best practices for advertisers to follow to avoid fraudulent behavior?

  • To avoid fraudulent behavior and maintain advertising integrity, advertisers should follow these best practices:

    • Do not attempt to upload malware to the Roblox Ad Manager.
    • Do not provide false identification or payment information to Roblox.
    • Do not make fraudulent refund requests or dispute payments for services properly rendered.

Also, note that Roblox may suspend ad campaigns or advertiser accounts for non-payment of services properly rendered.

Thank you.

112 Likes
Immersive ads to include UGC Assets and Experience ads
Sponsored Experiences moving to Ads Manager
How to use immersive ads
#2

This topic was automatically opened after 11 minutes.

#3

Personally, I don’t like this update. First, any Roblox Developer should be able to promote there experience not just 18+ users. Second make it so we can buy with Robux, because not everyone trusts a gaming company having there credit card info

63 Likes
#4

Hello, i am very interested in this new ad system and i think it’s going to be very handy, however i have a question regarding languages, i know it’s going to be open for more languages in the future, but is there any plan to have a translated version of ADS for different languages?, ex: a Brazillian sees my ad in English, wouldn’t it be nice to have a portuguese version of it shown to them? i think this would help people have their desired audiences engage more with their content.

(while we’re still at it, i’d like to also suggest the same for game thumbnails)

13 Likes
#5

I think the immersive ads idea is great but I do think we should be able to use Robux as a means of purchasing ads, especially as most of the people who will be using it are likely to be Developers that already make their money via the Robux currency on Roblox.

Essentially, you’re making it unnecessarily more expensive for native Roblox developers to use this feature which is a bad move.

43 Likes
#6

What were you thinking? No Roblox developer is going to use this if you can’t advertise directly for Robux, making this completely useless. Ontop of this, what the hell is the point of restricting this to over 18, your making this completely unusable to the vast majority of the roblox developer base.

On top of this, the CPM for ads is still absolute garbage (20 cents fyi);

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Looking to see this improve up to 20-30x in the next few months for it to be actually viable at all, until then, no big developer is going to be using these in large quantities.

This is unacceptable, your own advertising guidelines state that developers must have control over what content gets put in their games, here we don’t have any control. What if I don’t want a certain brand/competitors game advertising in my game, there’s nothing I can do. Bit hypocritical.

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On top of this, its unfair that we as independent advertisers don’t have access to these metrics for individual players via API, but Roblox does, encouraging brands to go to Roblox instead of individual developers for automatic ad systems, another way Roblox is directly stifling competition and building a monopoly through their ad system.

I’ve been a big advocate for ads for the past few years, but this is just a disappointing poorly thought out mess since this was released.

71 Likes
#7

Roblox makes money from people buying Robux with their real money, why would they handle this any different?

10 Likes
#8

Are there hopes to open this up to non-company-scale teams? Keeping this restricted imposes a welcome quality floor for these advertisements I would hope, but also severely limits who can benefit from this system. I’m hoping this is the intention for first steps with this feature, and that this will loosen over time.

6 Likes
#9

Roblox is racking up the USD from ads while paying out a measly supply of a currency they created with little value and a horrendous exchange rate (Robux) while casually ignoring our feedback of a transparent pay cut.

Ah yes
:laughing:

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32 Likes
#10

Why on earth is this 18+, and accepts real currency only, at that? This system will probably be sparsely used by most developers because of these restrictions, so I’m unsure as to what the intent is here other than hoping to get more money out of developers being forced to DevEx their robux before reinvesting it into ads.

19 Likes
#11

I feel like this implementation may be very tone deaf to the desires of small developers who seemed to be the intended audience to benefit from this launch of in-game advertising. I don’t mean to be hard on it as an idea, I think it is a great idea when implemented correctly, but this doesn’t serve smaller developers or fit into the whole “make your own game” feeling of the platform. The big dealbreaker keeping me away from this is that you have to use a card instead of Robux. Small developers will have Robux, not cash. Advertising should assist small developers to prosper and grow while also benefiting the platform itself.

7 Likes
#12

This is a very interesting update. As a developer under the age of 18, I can not create ads, but I have asked where can users/developers create ads immersive ads. This is great, and I’m happy that we can get advertisers on the platform.

3 Likes
#13

very obvious this is designed to benefit megacorporations and big business. you should of improved the growth systems for the small creators before this.

16 Likes
#14

You know I was excited as soon as I saw the title, but the guidelines are ridiculous. This is only beneficial to larger developers and corporations. This action really needs to be rethought.

4 Likes
#15

Why can’t we make ads with robux? Would help my company a lot.

1 Like
#16

It’s a bit difficult to get excited about the Ads Manager experience when I’m already reserving most of my Robux income for an already-hammering Developer Exchange experience and not even considering the existing advertisement systems because their barrier to entry is too high and ineffective. I’ve not used sponsors or ads because I’m not about to lose critical capital on something with little returns to meet the investment that I make in them. Incredibly troubling.

This is exactly why I’ve been advocating for developer-curated sorts for the past more than half a decade; if developers that are already more successful than me are struggling with the returns of the ad system, I’m not in any position to consider that when I’ll just get crushed by teams with significantly more capital, reach and influence in staff/automatic curation. I might as well hold on to the hope that I can improve my discoverability to my specific niche on my own rather than continue to be pummeled by crippling advertising features. The quality of ads is the only upside to this barrier, but I believe this is one case where the negatives are outweighing the positives.

9 Likes
#17

Honestly, i was thinking about doing immersive ads for my “experience”.

When I saw on the site that it only accepts USD as a currency, I just noped out instantly. I live in a country where inflation is quite increasing rapidly and so is the exchange rate. There is no way I’d be able to pay in IRL cash as I mostly have my funds in robux.

The whole system just doesn’t respect smaller developers who try to grow and want to have their game out there. It just benefits already big studios and megacorporations who just have the upper hand and millions of dollars to spend.

9 Likes
#18

I think the lot of you aren’t thinking about this from a corporate POV. When dealing with advertising, NOWHERE on earth or online will you find a platform for people under 18 to do this kind of advertising. This is similar to Google Adsense, where advertisers put their adverts on Adsense users webpages. You do not expect a person under 18 to submit adverts because there are stipulations. Everything can’t be traded with Robux. This information is required (Name, Address, etc etc) in any advertising platform outside of Roblox.

5 Likes
#19

Except Roblox already has a precedent of letting under 18 users advertise through sponsers and user ads, these are ads, same thing should apply to immersive ads.

4 Likes
#20

I understand your point about Roblox already allowing under 18 users to advertise through sponsors and user ads. However, it’s important to consider that immersive ads on Roblox involve a different level of interaction and integration with the platform compared to traditional ads.

Immersive ads require users to provide real information such as name, address, and more. This additional information is typically required in advertising platforms outside of Roblox as well, in order to ensure compliance with legal and regulatory standards. It’s crucial for Roblox to adhere to these standards when implementing immersive ads to maintain a safe and responsible environment for its users.

3 Likes