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Ad Weight

Ad weight is an indicator of how often a particular ad should appear relatively to other ads in the same pool of ads. The ad weight determines its priority for ad serving purposes.

Values

The value ranges from 0 to 10 for low-priority ads. The value is 11 and above for high-priority ads. The higher the weight, the more likely this ad is displayed to visitors. A weight of zero means that the ad is on hold (paused), would not get served and no impression is recorded.

Since weighting is relative to other ads, if you put all ads at weight 10, it does not mean there will be more impressions in total. On the other hand, if you would like to setup default ads that should only be displayed after premium inventory is depleted or restricted, do not set the ad weight at zero. For default ad, use the zone-chaining feature with a secondary zone of default ads instead. For more control of ad impressions, you can set a maximum impression or a share of impression

Example

Three ads in Zone Y: ad A, B, and C have weight of 4, 4 and 12 respectively. That means the total weight is 20 and these ads A, B, and C will have 20% (4/20), 20% (4/20) and 60% (12/20) respectively of zone Y's total impressions.

Considerations

Time frame should be considered when comparing impressions between two ads. An recently added banner, even with weight of 10, will get less impressions than another banner that you added a month ago. However, the banner with a larger weight will gain more impressions over time.

Restrictions can block an ad, regardless of its priority, from displaying. Ads with 3 times the weight will have around 3 times more impressions for the same time period before any restrictions are considered. For example, an ad that is only available to US visitors will not display to non-US visitors no matter how high its priority is. Therefore, the impression allocation might not correlate to the weight distribution because of ad restrictions.

Auto Priority

If the priority is set to Auto, our ad engine automatically and frequently evaluates the daily/monthly target setting for your ad. The weight/priority is increased automatically to meet your allocated/target impression number to avoid under-delivery. The weight is decreased to slow down if the quota is easily satisfied to avoid over-delivery.

If the ad has a monthly quota, it is divided into a daily quota when computing the forecast. The goal is to spread its impressions over the month. However, the distribution pattern might change if it is near the end of the month or its flight date but the ad is still under-delivered, the weight will be increased rapidly to serve this ad more frequently to reach the target quota. You can add an auto daily quota to distribute more evenly each day.

Forecasting

The adjustment is based on forecasting with available historical data. For new ads, it might be a couple days before enough data is available for forecasting. Thus, if the available inventory can satisfy a new ad in a very short period, the forecasting might not be very accurate because there is not enough data for prediction. To avoid this situation, if you know the total available inventory for the ad is many times more than its allocated amount, it is recommended that you add a daily, monthly, or hourly restriction on the ad to avoid over-delivery. For example, total inventory is 1000/day sharing between 3 ads (333/day per ad). A new ad with 200 allocated for the whole month will reach its target very quickly and you would need to use a daily quota to smooth out delivery.

Ad Optimization

When combining auto-priority with an ad optimizer, it allows you to display the better performing ads more often.