Hi everyone,
We want advertising on Roblox, like our economy, to be seamless for everyone to participate. To achieve this goal, we’re focused on driving value for everyone in our ads ecosystem: advertisers, publishers, and users.
With Roblox ads, we believe creators and brands should be able to achieve their core objectives, like driving discovery and awareness, and leveraging ads as an additional way to earn, all while making sure users see ads that are compelling, relevant, and transparent.
To support this, we have several enhancements and changes that we wanted to share with you. In the coming weeks, we will have more detailed posts, which will include:
- Moving Sponsored Experiences to Ads Manager
- Improving the discoverability of Sponsored Experiences
- Testing the video ad format for Immersive Ads
- New brand safety and suitability controls, along with expanded eligibility for Immersive Ads
- Removing User Ads in early Q1 2024
Driving discovery of your experiences and creations
Advertising on Roblox can help you find new audiences for your experiences and creations. For advertisers, we’re focused on building a platform based on advertiser outcomes with simple but powerful tools using the following principles:
Buying ads should be simple
Today, we have three disparate platforms: Immersive Ads (in Ads Manager), Sponsored Ads, and User Ads which are each their own system. We want to make it straightforward for you to create, optimize, and measure your ads, so we’re working on moving to a single platform, Ads Manager, to create ads. As part of our effort to simplify, we will begin moving Sponsored Experience creation to Ads Manager next month, and removing User Ads in early Q1 2024 with the goal to consolidate all ad purchasing in Ads Manager in 2024. Ads Manager will soon be available for users over 13.
Focused on the objectives you care about
As an advertiser, you may want to bid differently by objectives such as driving awareness of your brand, driving visits to your experience, or increasing engagement. We’re moving Sponsored Experiences to Ads Manager, to move to the objective-based platform that powers Immersive Ads. Using Ads Manager, you can bid based on the objective that you care about (e.g. visits). We will show ads to users most likely to take your desired action. Our goal is to allow you to optimize for additional objectives such as video views, engagement, and monetization.
Ads should drive visibility for your experiences
In the coming months, we will move the placement of Sponsored Experiences to make them more prominent to users and drive more visits to your experiences. We will be testing potential solutions in the coming month. The higher placement may drive more visibility to the Sponsored sort and increase available impression opportunities.
Advertisers should have more control over brand safety
One of the biggest requests from advertisers is to have more control over the experiences in which their ads are shown. Later this year, we will launch new brand safety and suitability controls for Immersive Ads to give brands and developers more control over where their ads will be shown.
Additional ways to monetize with Immersive Ads
We built Immersive Ads to provide incremental revenue opportunities for creators on Roblox and to allow advertisers to reach new audiences on our platform. We recently published learnings that found that by combining Immersive Ads with in-experience monetization, creators can earn more than just through in-experience monetization.
One of our top priorities for immersive ads is to allow them to appear in more experiences - and drive greater demand (advertiser budgets) for those ads.
We’re still in our early days but committed to building a robust platform. Some areas we’re working on are:
New advertising formats
Next month, we will be testing the video ad format for Immersive Ads to provide advertisers with new ways to express their ideas and provide new opportunities for publishers to earn.
Increasing eligibility for Immersive Ads
At the same time as launching brand safety and suitability controls, we plan to open up Immersive Ads eligibility to all experiences with Experience Guidelines. Previously, only a limited set of experiences were eligible to host Immersive Ads. We anticipate launching brand safety controls will drive more demand for Immersive Ads with brands while enabling many more creators to earn from Immersive Ads and keeping our platform safe for all.
Ads are non-intrusive and integrated with the user experience
We want to ensure that all Roblox ads are non-intrusive and integrated with the user experience. This is why we have decided to remove User Ads in early Q1 2024. We’ve seen over the years that user ads have become incredibly creative but sometimes disruptive to the user experience. Our vision for the future of ads is that they are easily identified and fit with all of our organic content on our Homepage and other surfaces, and personalized so users are always seeing content that is relevant to them. We hope this change will help maintain our commitment to providing a platform for everyone to enjoy. Creators can use Sponsored Experiences and Sponsored Items to continue to acquire customers.
The future of ads on Roblox
Going forward, we plan to continue to invest in our ads platform to make it work well for you, whether you are an advertiser, publisher, or user. Over the next year, we will be rolling out solutions to help you better understand the impact of your ads through better measurement and reporting.
Additionally, we will add new targeting options that allow you to reach people interested in specific genres and other dimensions. We’re also working on providing Publishers with more control over earnings and which advertisers are eligible to appear in experiences.
Please let us know if there are other things you’d like to see going forward from our advertising platform.
Thank you.
FAQ
Click here to view the FAQ!
When will I no longer be able to create a User Ad?
- We’re currently planning for early Q1 2024. We will share an update in advance of the final date.
What about groups? With the removal of User Ads, I can no longer promote groups.
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The vast majority of User Ads purchased were for experiences or groups that promoted Marketplace items. We’re going to continue supporting advertising of experiences through Ads Manager. For Marketplace items, you can still purchase Sponsored Items ads to promote individual items, just not groups.
For those who have used user ads to promote groups, stay tuned as we work to improve groups discovery over the long term. In the meantime, you may want to consider channels outside of Roblox or other creative ways to promote your content
Will you be migrating Sponsored Items ad creation to Ads Manager?
- We don’t have a timeline yet but plan to migrate the ability to promote Avatar items in Ads Manager.
Will I be able to buy ads with Robux?
- In Ads Manager, you will be able to convert your Robux to an Ad Credit at the standard DevEx rate. We will cover this in more detail in an upcoming post on DevForum.
As a publisher, can I say which brands are allowed in my experience?
- Next year, we will provide publishers with more control over what brands can appear in their experiences.
