Ad Revenue ROAS campaign best practices

Before configuring your ad revenue ROAS campaign, take some time to review the recommended best practices.

Meet eligibility requirements

Before enabling Audience Pinpointer ROAS campaign goals in a target country, Unity needs to collect data from end users in that country. This group of users is often referred to as a cohort.

Eligibility for ad revenue campaigns comes from 30 days of mature install cohort data. This means you will need to run an install (CPI) campaign through both the maturation period and the eligibility period. Refer to the following table for approximate ad revenue eligibility periods.

Optimization windowMaturation timeEligibility period
Day-zeroTwo daysDays 2 – 32
Day-sevenTen daysDays 10 – 40

During this eligibility period, your campaign collects data from the cohort in order to learn more about your ad and its audience. Your campaign fulfills its eligibility once the install campaign cohort generates the necessary data.

Refer to the table below for the necessary requirements for each targeted location in your Ad revenue campaign:

Data collection methodEligibility requirements
MMP postbacks
  • 200 Unity-attributed installs in seven days
  • Ad revenue passed to Unity with an MMP

Understand how billing types affect bids

In Audience Pinpointer campaigns, the CPI bid is the actual bid placed for a new user. The way you pay for this bid depends on your billing type. For CPI-billed (cost per install) campaigns, you only pay the CPI bid when an install occurs. For CPM-billed (cost per thousand impressions) campaigns, you pay an average spend per install, which is usually close to the average CPI bid.

The following table demonstrates how your billing type determines how you pay for installs in an Audience Pinpointer campaign.

Billing typeWhat you pay
CPI billingYour CPI bid when an install occurs
CPM billingAn average spend per install

Set appropriate ROAS targets

To make sure you set effective ROAS targets, look at the seven-day ROAS you have historically achieved with similar install campaigns. Set a ROAS target similar to what you have observed in this install campaign.

If you set the target too high, unrealistic user criteria might limit scale and lead to reduced traffic. In general, the higher your ROAS target, the lower your bids, so setting extremely high ROAS targets yields very low bids that are unlikely to win impressions.

Unity’s algorithm predicts seven-day return on ad spend, so allow at least a full week or two using the provided guidelines to let the data mature before adjusting the target up or down based on campaign performance.

Remove allowlists and blocklists

Because Audience Pinpointer campaigns are purely optimized towards users, the recommended best practices is to clear any allowlisted or blocklisted apps for hybrid campaigns.

Contact your Unity account representative if you want to retain these lists for your Audience Pinpointer campaigns. For more information, refer to the documentation on App targeting.

Next steps: Start an ad revenue ROAS campaign.