When you create an Ad Campaign, you have the option to let the campaign automatically rotate the creatives that have the highest performance based on the metric that is specified. This is a helpful resource when you want to A/B test your banners/creatives to see which one returns with the best performance. Additionally, the ad manager will automatically give preferential rotation weight to the banner that has the best performance, saving you the effort of resetting custom weights for each banner on a regular basis. You can rest assured that the better performing creative will see the greatest amount of impressions, ideally resulting in the optimal performance of the campaign.
Enabling Optimization in the Campaign
When creating/editing an ad campaign, go to the “Optimization” setting and set it to Enabled. Then, select the optimization metric:
There are five types of optimization to choose from:
- Click-through rate (CTR) – This is calculated by the # of impressions / # of clicks for each creative.
- Conversion Rate (CR) – The number of clicks / # of conversions for each creative
- Revenue per thousand impressions (RPM) – This metric measures the total revenue / per 1,000 impressions displayed. (Or revenue / (total impressions / 1,000)
- Revenue per Click (RPC) – The total revenue/total # of clicks
- Profit – This is calculated by the total revenue – total payouts. The creative that gets the highest value here gets displayed the most.
Ad Campaign Rotation
When you have selected the metric that you want to optimize your ad campaigns with, you can start running the ad tag to start getting stats for the campaign. As your campaign starts seeing impressions, clicks, and conversions coming in, the optimization tool will start choosing preferences for the specific banners that perform better and giving them preference in the rotation. While other banners will still be shown, the banner that continues to perform better will see a higher proportion of impressions.
For example, let's say that you have an ad campaign that has three creatives with an optimization method set to conversion rate. (CR). They will all have no stats attributed to them at first since they will be added to the ad campaign At first, they will all have the same weight since their stats are the same. As traffic starts building, some of the banners will see better performance than others, even if the difference is small. After a bit creative #1 has a CR of 8.12%, creative #2 has a CR of 9.53%, and creative #3 has a CR of 5.88%. With this data, the ad campaign will choose creative #2 as the best-performing creative and will receive a higher allocation of impressions compared to the other two creatives.
Because creatives #1 and #3 are still seeing conversions, they will still get put in rotation with creative #2, however, their preference will be lowered because the campaign wants to display the better-performing creative more than others. The ad server will update regularly to make sure that the performance stats are in sync with what banners are given preference in rotation. Lower-performing creatives could start with lower performance but see their metrics rise later, giving them better rotation preference later on.