Help Center Manage Your Account Banner, Richmedia, and Text Ads

Ad Weight or Ad Priority

Ad weight (also called "ad priority") is an indicator of how often a particular ad should appear relatively to other ads in the same pool of ads. The value ranges from 0 to 10 for low-priority ads and 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. If you would like to setup default ads that should only display after premium inventory is restricted or depleted, a secondary zone of default ads should be setup.

Example

Three ads in Zone Y: ad A, B, and C have weight of 4, 4 and 12 respectively. That means these ads A, B, and C will have 20%, 20% and 60% respectively of the total impressions in zone Y. However, you have to consider the time frame 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, a banner with a larger weight will have more impressions over time.

Auto Priority

Our ad engine periodically (every 30-60 minutes) evaluates the daily/monthly target setting for your ad. It increases the weight/priority automatically to meet your allocated/target impression number (avoid under-delivery) and it decreases the weight to slow down (avoid over-delivery).

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.

If the ad has a monthly target, it is evenly divided into a daily target. When combining this setting with an ad optimizer, it allows you to display the better performing ads more often. High/Auto priority starts from 11 and up.

Other Articles in Banner, Richmedia, and Text Ads

• Ad Dimension
• Ad Specifications
• Ad Types
• Alternative Image/Media URL
• Catfish Ad
• Click Tracking URL
• Destination URL or Click URL
• Expandable or rollover Flash ad
• Floating or layer ad
• How do I change the window title of my pop-up/pop-under ads?
• How do I mix image and text in an ad?
• How do I track click for Flash/SWF ads?
• How do I track clicks for HTML/RichMedia ads?
• HTML "alt" attribute for ad images
• HTML "Target" Attribute
• Image URL
• Peeling Ad
• Polite ad or two-phase ad
• QuickTime and Windows Media ads

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