Manage creative rotation

In a sequential rotation, the creatives are served to a user in the order you specify.

Set the order in the Order column. You can enter values or use the arrow keys (up and down).

Example

1. Your ad has three creatives: A, B, and C. You set the rotation to Sequential.

2. In the Order column, you enter 2 for creative A, 1 for creative B, and 3 for creative C.

3. That means creative B serves first, creative A serves second, and creative C serves third. The order from top to bottom doesn't matter. All that matters is the order of the numbers you enter in the Order column.

4. The first time a user sees your ad, the user sees creative B. Campaign Manager 360 selects that creative to serve first because it's number 1.

5. The second time a user sees our ad, the user sees creative A. Campaign Manager 360 selects that creative because it's number 2.

6. The third time a user sees your ad, the user sees creative C. Campaign Manager 360 selects that creative because it's number 3.

7. The fourth time a user sees your ad, Campaign Manager 360 starts over and shows creative B again.

Note that in ads with sequential rotation, the first creative is served most often, because not all users see an ad more than once. Each subsequent creative is served less often than the creatives that came before it, because it becomes less and less likely that the same user will see the ad again. More users see the ad twice than three times, and so on.

In an even rotation, your creatives rotate evenly. Each time your ad is served, Campaign Manager 360 selects a creative at random. Because each creative has the same weight as the others, they should all be served about the same number of times.

In a custom rotation, you can set your own weights for each creative. If a creative has a higher weight than the others, it gets served more often.

Set custom weights in the Weight column.

Note: Weights are now only available when using custom rotation.

Example

1. You have two creatives, creative A and creative B.

2. Creative A has a weight of 8. Creative B has a weight of 2. That's a total of 10 for both creatives.

   • Creative A serves about 80% of the time. That's because its weight is 80% of all the weights: 8 is 80% of 10.

   • Creative B serves about 20% of the time. That's because its weight is 20% of all the weights: 2 is 20% of 10.

How weights work

Weights determine how often a creative is chosen to serve with your ad. Creatives with higher weights are served more often than creatives with lower weights.

You can set manual weights or let Campaign Manager 360 adjust weights based on performance, giving a higher weight to the creatives that perform best.

Weighting is proportional: if a creative has twice the weight of the other creatives in your rotation, it will serve twice as often.

Next to each weight in the Weights column, you can see the approximate percentage of times a creative will serve with your ad. (This is the percentage of the creative's weight compared with the weights of all your creatives.)

For example, if a creative's weight is 20%, it will serve about 20% of the time. The rest of the creatives will serve the other 80% of the time.

Weighting is not an exact division of impressions across your creatives. Instead, it affects the probability that one creative will be chosen to serve over the others. Campaign Manager 360 picks your creative at random each time, but a creative with a higher weight has a better chance of being picked.

It's like reaching into a jar of pebbles. If 80% of the the pebbles in a jar are black and 20% are white, you're going to get a black pebble about 80% of the time. Over time, weighting percentages should be very close to the actual portion of impressions given to each creative.

Note: Creative weights are set per placement, per ad, which means you can assign different weights to the same creative in different placements and in different ads.

In a rotation based on click-through rate, the creative with the highest click-through rate is served much more often than the other creatives.

Campaign Manager 360 delivers the winning creative at least 75% of the time, plus a portion of the remaining impressions: the last 25% is divided evenly between the all the creatives, including the winner.

These numbers are reflected in the weights for your creative.

In an optimized rotation, Campaign Manager 360 weights your creatives based on a metric you choose. Add optimization metrics in your campaign properties. The metrics you add will be available in every ad, in the ad properties. For each ad, you can choose one optimization metric for creative rotation.

1. Add one or more optimization metrics in your campaign properties, under "Creative optimization."

   • Choose a metric type from the menu and enter a name that helps you identify it. Otherwise, Campaign Manager 360 will name it based on the metric type.

   • For conversions, you must choose one or more Floodlight activities.

2. Click Add another metric to add multiple metrics. Click Remove to remove metrics you don't need.

   • Why add multiple metrics: Add multiple metrics if you want to optimize rotation in different ads based on different metrics.

     For example, you might optimize on ad's rotation based on clicks and another based on click-through conversions. Or you might want to optimize based on click-through conversions for every ad but use different Floodlight activities depending on the ad.

3. If you have multiple optimization metrics, choose one of them as the default optimization metric. This should be the one you plan to use most often, because you can change the default across many ads at once: If you change the default optimization metric, it affects every ad that is currently using it.

   For example, if you choose a new default metric in your campaign properties, then every ad that is using your default metric will switch to the new default metric you choose.

   This sounds tricky, but it's simple. Here's an example: Say your campaign has two optimization metrics, "clicks" and "click-through conversions." You choose "clicks" as the default in your campaign. Then you choose the default as the optimization metric for twenty of your ads. If you switch the default in your campaign, all twenty ads will change their rotation to the new default as well. So if you change the default metric from "clicks" to "click-through conversions," all twenty ads will optimize their rotation based on "click-through conversions."

4. Open an ad to choose an optimized rotation. You can find your metric options under "Optimized," in the creative rotation menu. These correspond to the metrics you added in your campaign properties.

   For example, say you choose clicks as your optimization metric in your campaign. That means your ads will offer optimization by clicks as a creative rotation option.

5. If you selected a conversion option, click Add Floodlight activity to add the Floodlight activities that determine conversions.