I’m a professional Digital Marketing Analyzer and account manager for Google Ads accounts (for decently sized accounts of about a total of a million USD ad spend a year)
Gender targeting and age targeting is a step forward in better optimizing for conversions and lowering wasted spend.
The amount of spoofing isn’t as high as some people would think. You will save money and get better returns thanks to this new level of targeting. This is real marketing, personal opinions on gender and whatever nonsense probably doesn’t belong here.
Age targeting? That wont work well as many people fake their ages to bypass things like tags. For example if you make a game like Adopt Me and you set it for say 8 years old, but all the 8 year olds choose 18 to be able to say numbers without being tagged then they wouldn’t be seeing the ad?
Regarding gender targeting: the real question is, why not use it? It’s a data point Roblox already has for most people, and the fact of the matter is that there are types of games that tend to be played more by one gender than the other. Ideally we’d be able to select with incredible granularity which kinds of people we want to show the ad to based on what they like, but we can’t. Until that day comes, gender is a fine solution that makes advertising robux better spent, because at the end of the day, I wouldn’t market a princess roleplay game to a +13 male.
Including these options is about maximizing ad clicks based on the data Roblox has. That’s really all there is to it, and removing them would be a huge waste.
@M_caw, what stereotyping is going on here? Roblox is simply letting us choose which of a user-submitted data point we’d like to advertise to. You’re more than welcome to advertise your game to whoever you want to. There are real statistics that prove certain genders are more interested in games with certain themes and mechanics, and regardless of how that comes to be, the point stands that from an advertising perspective, money should be spent targeting consumers who are statistically more likely to consume the product.
The next step roblox should consider in my opinion is to enable games to be placed in more reasonable “categories” so that advertisers can advertise to people depending on which category of games they like.
For example, if the player likes royal high and crown academy, and they like roleplay games, if the advertisers want to advertise their own roleplay game, they can set their ads so that it appears to users who generally play roleplay games.
To anyone demoting gender targeting or struggling to understand it:
Gender targeting is a great step into real world marketing. For example: you have a doll game. If this is advertised to boys, do you think they will want to play it? Most likely not. You have another WWII fighting game. Boys are more likely to play this. The success of an ad all depends on your target audience.
What I would like to know is if they’re going to make a “cap” on the number of Robux you can bid, because I know a lot of developers that constantly get outbid on sponsors and ads because they simply don’t have the financial means to put in 10,000 Robux each weekend into sponsors or advertisements if there’s no guarantee they’ll make that Robux back or get more concurrent player base members.
Really happy to see this as it gives a more modern approach to marketing, I always felt limited with the few options that developers had before. Although gender is useful to market towards, I feel like we should also be able to see statics on our game based on gender as it will give us better insights on what to market to, kind of like what we currently have for age.
A boy won’t shy away from Royal High any more than a girl would if not for the existing stereotypes in our world that tell us that girls should dress up and such… it’s not that Roblox is creating stereotypes, rather, they’re using them to their advantage.
This is fantastic, it always felt like putting large amounts of robux into ads just for it to lasts 24 hours was a massive waste of resources. Now it should be a lot more organized and easy to plan ahead. Rather than placing small amounts of robux separately for ads. However I do believe this might cause a massive flood of advertisements that could drown smaller funded ads? Im not sure yet how this will affect developers in general.
Edit: Apparently you can’t select none. I’m assuming selecting all would run the ads for all players, including those with no gender data, since otherwise they’d never receive ads (which sounds awesome), so my point about selecting all still stands.
First off, I definitely agree that your interests are not determined by your gender. That being said, I don’t believe targeted advertising enforces stereotypes.
Here’s an example:
Say someone knows I’m a furry. If they come up to me and say, “Hey, want to go watch Zootopia?” They’re not enforcing anything, they’re just catering/pandering to me, and that’s what advertising is. if targeted advertising enforces gender stereotypes, then all advertising enforces all stereotypes and the topic becomes a moot point since it’s all one big game of manipulation.
I’ve said my piece on the matter, and TBH the forums are not the best place for political discussion, so I’m gonna sign off. I hope you at least understand where I’m coming from.
Are there any plans to reimburse users for site downtime when they run ads/sponsors? I’ve seen many others complain about the issue and now with the updated system, it’s a good time to talk about it.
My opinion on this was stated well by @M_caw before but in case it wasn’t clear:
Please do not let people target based on gender. It’s not an important statistic and is liable to hurt people long-term, either through profiling or through other more obscure means.
This is an incredible upgrade and I’m excited to see it come to fruition. I believe these ad filters will add to the earning potential of ads. The extra metrics are going to be very insightful as well and help me calculate cost per play easily. I can also A/B test and not bloat up my dashboard.
Thanks a ton for the ability to drill down to different demographics. This is incredibly impactful and closer to industry standards.
Being able to target demographics means developers will be able to get more traffic per dollar spent on ads which will particularly help more niche games and smaller devs find footing.
Somehow Instagram exclusively advertises mobile RPGs to me, because it knows I love RPGs. It would be fantastic if the Roblox system expanded to be like this in the future so we can advertise our games to players who are into the same genre!
This is the first time an advertising/sponsoring system update has been released by Roblox in years, I want to give everybody involved a big THANK YOU. Sponsoring allows countless developers a chance to earn a living on Roblox, to do the good in the world they want to do. More statistics is always better. I think everyone posting about gender and stereotypes should backup their claims with science. Data and the scientific method allow countless leaps and bounds in human discovery, and with more data going developers’ way, the science of how to earn a living on Roblox game development will get more sound, benefiting current and future devs alike. I can also imagine added statistics for different genres of games based similarly to how the recommended for you sort works.
I will also be able to update my tutorial with new information once I get access!
