Documentation

Support

Unity Ads User Acquisition

Campaigns

Attribution

Open User Acquisition dashboard

Unity Ads User Acquisition

In-app Purchase ROAS campaign best practices

Review the recommended best practices for In-app Purchase Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) campaigns with Unity Ads User Acquisition.
Read time 2 minutesLast updated 6 hours ago
Before configuring your in-app purchace 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 In-app Purchase ROAS campaigns comes from 30 days of a mature install cohort. This means you will need to run an install (CPI) campaign through both the maturation period and the eligibility period. For In-app Purchase campaigns, maturation takes roughly ten days, so the eligibility period will take place on days 10 – 40 of your install campaign. During this eligibility period, your campaign collects data from the cohort to learn more about your ad and its audience. Your campaign fulfills its eligibility once the cohort generates the necessary data. Refer to the table below for the necessary requirements for each targeted location in your In-app Purchase campaign:

Data collection method

Eligibility requirements

Unity SDK
  • 10 paying users (all installs, not just Unity-attributed)
Note: Users must make in-app purchases through the platform provider's store to be considered paying users.
MMP postbacks
  • 10 paying users (Unity-attributed installs)

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 type

What 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 in-app purchase 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 In-app Purchase ROAS campaign.