Launch & promotion
Roblox Ads objectives and audiences: choose for the decision
The objective changes delivery optimization, while the audience changes traffic composition. Choose both before making creatives; otherwise the artwork receives a job the result cannot answer honestly.
Focused deep dive
Decision matrix
Current Ads Manager documentation says Plays seeks likely game starts, limited Earnings seeks likely spenders, and Engagement seeks age-checked highly engaged players for the Roblox Kids and Select threshold. Engagement is optional and does not pause automatically at the threshold. Available audiences include All, New, Recent, and Lapsed under Roblox's stated eligibility conditions.
Do not rename Plays as retention: it delivers starts, while quality is observed later. Recent and Lapsed address returning players; New addresses first entry. Advanced Targeting can narrow location, age, gender, genre, and device. Apply a constraint only for a product reason.
| Decision | Candidate objective/audience | Guardrail |
|---|---|---|
| Test first experience | Plays + New | First loop, errors, mature D1 |
| Re-engage players | Plays + Lapsed | Incremental return and repeat loop |
| Test a mature economy | Earnings if available | Margin, attribution, retention |
| Reach a special threshold | Engagement | Dedicated budget and manual pause |
Record before publication
Hypothetical example: a team wants to test onboarding but selects Recent. The result describes familiar players and cannot answer the newcomer question. The repair is a separate bounded New Players cycle, not relabeling the metric.
Record objective, audience, exclusions, destination place, creative promise, and action for each outcome. Goal and audience are fixed after publication; a changed question needs a new cycle.
- Write one decision and target player.
- Choose the objective by its optimized event.
- Add targeting only for an explainable reason.
- Verify audience availability in the current account.
- Preserve settings and compare only matching campaigns.
Primary sources
Put this into practice in MARPLA
Record the objective and loss limit, create a bounded test and compare spend with player quality. Before stopping, save a snapshot and verify each campaign’s confirmed state.
- Launch, evaluate and stop advertisingRun a controlled launch, separate paid traffic from organic traffic, and verify that every campaign has stopped.Step-by-step guide →
- Compare audience composition and qualityCompare a complete period with its predecessor and separate audience mix change from within-segment metric change.Step-by-step guide →
- Compare advertising resultsReports help you see which campaigns bring players and at what cost.Step-by-step guide →
Where this deep dive applies
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