Help Center Manage Your Account Ad Targeting using Restrictions

Share of Voice - Share of Impression

You can set an ad to maintain a certain percentage of daily impressions within a zone or a group. This saves you from having to calculate and estimate the total available inventory and allocate an impression quota for the ad manually. The ad priority will be set to Auto and our system will adjust the ad weight settings automatically.

Types

Share of Voice (SoV), or Share of Impression, is available for the following scenarios:

Set an ad to maintain a certain percentage within a zone
Set an ad to maintain a certain percentage within a group
Set a group to maintain a certain percentage within a zone

Setup Instructions

Click on an ad or group name
Click on "Restrictions" tab and click "Add"
Choose the type to be "Share of Voice"
Choose the parent entity and enter the target percentage

Example - Ad in a Zone

Ad ABC is set to maintain 60% of impressions served in zone XYZ. The initial percentage is calculated using today impression numbers of this ad and this zone. If it's under 60%, the ad priority will be continuously increased until its impression number for today reaches about 60%. If its share is more than the target number, the ad will stop displaying and wait for its share to become lower as other ads in this zone are served.

Example - Ad in a Group

Group XYZ has 4 ads. They could be alternate versions of the same advertising campaign (A/B ad testing) or from the same advertiser. The advertiser wants to show them equally. For this setup, each ad is set to have 25% of the group's impression inventory.

Example - Group in a Zone

You have multiple advertisers within a zone and each advertiser can have multiple ads or ad variants. But you want the advertisers to get their fair share. For example, zone ABC has 3 ads: A, B and C. Group XYZ links to 2 ads: A and B. You can set group XYZ to maintain 50% of zone ABC. In this example, ad A and B will get 50% and ad C gets 50%.

Multiple Zones

If an ad has Share of Voice (SoV) restrictions with multiple zones, each SoV is considered separately. For example, you would like ad X to share 60% of zone ABC, 30% of zone DEF. When selecting an ad for zone ABC, only the 60% SoV will be considered. The 30% SoV for zone DEF will be ignored.

If there are conflicting SoV values that pull the ad in both directions, the desirable balance might not be reached. This happens when a high SoV pulls the ad priority up while another low SoV pulls the ad priority down. To avoid this issue, you would need to determine a reasonable SoV value for each of the target zones.

Considerations

If a zone/group only has one active ad, no need to apply any SoV for it because its share is 100%.

When you first apply the target percentage or significantly change the target percentage (eg: from 20% to 60%), it might take up to several hours to establish a balance, depending on the actual traffic pattern.

If the balance cannot be reached and the Auto weight is maxed out, it means:

There are too many high-priority ads in the same zone competing for the same inventory, or
This ad has other restrictions that limits its availability. For example: deep/narrow geographical targeting