Introduction to User Acquisition bidding

Learn about how bidding works with Unity User Acquisition.

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Last updated 2 months ago

When you run a user acquisition campaign, your campaign makes bids to place your ad in other apps. These user acquisition bids determine how much of your campaign budget you spend to get impressions.

Bid terminology

Review the following user acquisition bidding terms used in this documentation.

Bid term	Acronym	Definition
Effective cost per thousand impressions	eCPM	The calculated cost of one thousand impressions, based on the video conversion rate and cost per install
Video conversion rate	CVR	The rate at which users who view your ad install your app
Cost per install	CPI	The amount of your campaign budget spent to acquire an install
Cost per mille (per impression)	CPM	The average cost of one thousand impressions
Target cost per install	tCPM	The dynamic cost of one thousand impressions, based on the expected video conversion rate.

Unity Ads is a bidding platform. The exposure of your ad campaign depends on its eCPM (effective cost per thousand impressions), which is determined by the CVR (video conversion rate from impression to install) and CPI (cost per install) of your campaign. The higher your campaign's eCPM, the more exposure it receives. Unity User Acquisition provides a variety of bidding strategies to match your campaign goals:

Campaign goal	Bidding strategy
Installs	Cost per install (CPI) bids. Unity supports manual and automated CPI bids.
Return on Ad Spend (ROAS)	Dynamic automated bidding based on ROAS targets
Event engagement	Cost per event (CPE) bids

Install bids

Unity supports two different types of CPI bids: manual and automated. Refer to the following sections for descriptions of these bid types.

Manual bids

Use a manual bidding strategy to set a static CPI bid that you want to pay per install throughout the day. The system tries to optimize the bids to achieve an average CPI. This means that sometimes the CPI can be higher or lower than the bid amount.

Automated bids

Automated CPI bidding automatically manages and spends your Daily budget. This strategy maximizes installs for budget-constrained campaigns and optimizes budget usage throughout the day. Refer to the Introduction to automated bids for Install campaigns for information.

Documentation

Development

User Acquisition

Monetization

Industry

Documentation

Development

User Acquisition

Monetization

Industry

User Acquisition

Advertising Management API

Advertising Statistics API

User Acquisition

Introduction to User Acquisition bidding

Bid terminology

Bid term

Acronym

Definition

Campaign goal

Bidding strategy

Install bids

Manual bids

Automated bids