Introduction to Source Bidding
Use Source bidding to granularly target and price apps (sources) within your ad campaign, so that you can bid higher or lower on individual sources per geo.
Source bidding gives you the self-service tools to bid against individual source app IDs on a per-country basis. The Source Bidding feature vales each source app individually, based on its targeted locations and quality of users. The ability to bid on sources individually, instead of placing a single bid across all sources within a given targeted location, creates greater efficiency within your ad spend.
- Granular optimization: Instead of applying the same price across all sources within a targeted geographic location or larger app targeting list, make intelligent optimizations with granular bids for individual sources in each target location.
- Flexibility and targeting control: Increase control of how much you spend per source, and the flexibility to make changes.
- Self-service: The simplified interface allows you to set up and optimize campaigns on the Unity Ads User Acquisition dashboard without specialized support.
Important: Source bidding is available for static, CPI campaigns only.
How it works
Each source app has an associated source app ID. Source bidding lets you place bids against the source app IDs you want to target, per country, by modifying and uploading a spreadsheet in the User Acquisition dashboard.
To locate source app IDs, use Unity’s Report Builder to analyze the geo-level of each source your campaigns have reached. Pinpoint the best performing sources and use their IDs to target for Source Bidding.
Note: Sources may only be identified by their abstracted IDs; Unity cannot give out source IDs for specific apps.
Source bid strategy
To determine which sources to isolate and target, start with static CPI campaigns. Use the data from these initial campaigns to analyze the various sources driving traffic, and determine more granular bids based on your own individual return on ad spend (ROAS) and lifetime value (LTV) goals.
Use Source Bidding as a standalone campaign strategy, or as an additional targeting tactic alongside standard bids. If the Source Bids and Countries & Bids sections target the same Source App ID(s), the source app bids receive priority. You may also target geos in Source Bids that are not targeted in Countries & Bids.
Note: You can add source bids to campaigns that use Automated Bidding. The Automated Bidding algorithm treats each source bid as a maximum bid, which means that the actual discounted bid can fluctuate between zero and the source bid amount.