2026 Roblox ad benchmarks from live tracker data -- CTR ranges, cost per play by genre, competition trends, and the gap between top and bottom campaigns.
Single-number averages are how studios waste ad budget. The real story in 2026 Roblox advertising is the spread: a 10x gap between worst and best CTR, massive performance swings by genre, and hourly competition patterns that make the same campaign profitable or money-losing depending on when you launch it. This report pulls from aggregated campaign benchmarks, continuous tracker scans, and community-reported results to give you numbers you can actually plan against.
The Big Numbers
Anonymized real-ad benchmark ranges from aggregated Roblox Ads exports| Metric | Min | Median | P75 | Max |
|---|
| CTR (%) | 0.65 | 3.60 | 4.52 | 6.03 |
| Play Rate (%) | 0.49 | 2.02 | 2.82 | 3.87 |
| CPP ($) | 0.001 | 0.004 | 0.005 | 0.017 |
The benchmark spread is the number most people gloss over, and it's the most important one in the table. A 10x gap between worst and best CTR means quoting a "typical" click-through rate for planning purposes is close to useless -- your campaign will land somewhere in that range based on creative quality, targeting choices, and launch timing, and the distance between the 25th and 75th percentile is often the distance between a profitable campaign and a money pit. Studios that anchor on the median as a target rather than a midpoint consistently underinvest in creative testing, which the data keeps showing is the single highest-leverage variable in the entire system. Two campaigns targeting the same audience with the same budget can see radically different CPP based on nothing but the thumbnail.
Spending Patterns and Targeting
Targeting cohort comparison (anonymized)| Targeting Cohort | Spent | Plays | Median CTR | Median Play Rate | Median CPP |
|---|
| mobile-tablet | $755.70 | 268,979 | 3.32% | 2.03% | $0.003 |
| all-devices | $4,971.76 | 1,196,761 | 3.85% | 2.06% | $0.004 |
| pc | $27.34 | 3,406 | 0.65% | 0.49% | $0.008 |
Performance by objective group (anonymized)| Objective Group | Spent | Plays | Median CTR | Median Play Rate | Median CPP |
|---|
| maximize-plays | $5,401.68 | 1,390,492 | 3.40% | 1.98% | $0.004 |
| new-user-acquisition | $115.09 | 32,671 | 3.07% | 1.76% | $0.006 |
| retention-reactivation | $238.03 | 45,983 | 4.56% | 3.02% | $0.007 |
Here's a pattern that surprises most developers: broad targeting -- all genders, ages 13 and up -- consistently delivers lower cost per play than narrow demographic slices. This feels wrong. You'd expect precision targeting to be more efficient. But on Roblox, narrow audiences shrink the available auction inventory, which forces your budget to compete in a smaller pool where the same well-funded studios already dominate. You end up bidding against fewer but richer competitors. The notable exception is device targeting: filtering to mobile-only or desktop-only can genuinely improve CPP because device cohorts behave differently in terms of click patterns, and the auction competition varies by device type more than it does by age or gender. A mobile-only campaign during school hours, for instance, faces a very different competitive field than a desktop campaign in the evening.
Plays by Anonymized Genre Cohort
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The Lakehouse [HORROR]NRFL Studios
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[🪲CELL🪲] Universal Tower DefenseUniversal Tower Defense [UTD]
☠️ YORICK | Retro Tower DefensePlaything Games
mid eastern conflict simImmaGoSickoMode
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The Curse [HORROR]ItzMePanos
Streetbound: FightingStreetbound Community
How Competition Is Shifting
Daily Sponsor Volume (30d)
Highest observed hourly competition window: 19:00 UTC (85.85 avg sponsors).
Strong weekday-hour hotspot: Mon 20:00 UTC.
Hourly Sponsor Competition (7d)
The 30-day sponsor volume trend tells you whether the market is getting more or less crowded. A climbing daily count means more campaigns fighting for the same impression inventory, which pushes effective clearing prices up even if Roblox's published bid floors haven't changed. This is where the hourly chart becomes your tactical edge. Even in a rising market, the gap between peak and trough hours tends to widen -- off-peak windows become relatively more valuable as the overall market heats up. Developers who only monitor daily totals miss this intra-day dynamic entirely. A studio that shifts its launch window by four or five hours based on the hourly curve can capture materially cheaper impressions without changing anything else about the campaign.
Roblox's official November 2025 CPP benchmarks -- $0.0073 for Maximize Plays, $0.0187 for Acquire New Users, and a 271% qPTR lift from Search ads -- provide the closest thing to published market statistics available for the platform.
CPP benchmarks: Maximize Plays at $0.0073 and Acquire New Users at $0.0187. Search ads showed 271% improvement in qualified play-through rate.
Ads Manager Updates - November 2025
Best and worst anonymized campaign cohorts by cost per play (CPP)| Cohort | Type | Targeting | CPP | CTR | Play Rate |
|---|
| Best | trend-social | mobile-tablet | $0.001 | 6.03% | 3.87% |
| Best | obby-platformer | all-devices | $0.001 | 4.52% | 2.93% |
| Best | obby-platformer | all-devices | $0.001 | 4.99% | 3.35% |
| Weak | trend-social | all-devices | $0.017 | 3.80% | 2.27% |
| Weak | casual-arcade | all-devices | $0.010 | 2.96% | 1.62% |
| Weak | trend-social | all-devices | $0.010 | 2.80% | 1.49% |
Creative variance snapshots from aggregated ad-level data| Genre Cohort | Objective Group | Min CTR | Max CTR | Spread |
|---|
| trend-social | maximize-plays | 0.00% | 2.59% | 2.59% |
| obby-platformer | maximize-plays | 2.60% | 4.81% | 2.21% |
| trend-social | maximize-plays | 2.05% | 3.94% | 1.89% |
| casual-arcade | maximize-plays | 1.41% | 3.12% | 1.71% |
| other | retention-reactivation | 4.58% | 6.27% | 1.69% |
| trend-social | maximize-plays | 2.86% | 4.49% | 1.63% |
The creative variance table might be the most actionable data in this entire report. Within the same genre and objective group, the spread between worst and best CTR routinely exceeds 3x. Same audience, same platform, same week -- but one campaign's thumbnail pulls three times the clicks of another. The common reaction to a bad campaign is "ads don't work for my genre." The data says otherwise. More often, it means your creative is sitting in the bottom quartile and you haven't tested enough variants to find one that clears the median. Studios that run three or more thumbnail variants per campaign consistently land in the upper half of the CTR distribution. The ones that launch with a single untested thumbnail and pray are the ones writing DevForum posts about how ads are a waste of money.
What to Do With These Numbers
- Treat the benchmark ranges as guardrails, not goals. If your CTR sits below the 25th percentile after 24 hours, pause and rework your creative before burning more budget. Bottom-quartile campaigns almost never recover by throwing more Robux at them.
- Time your campaigns against the hourly competition curve. Shifting your launch window by 4-6 hours to hit a valley can shave 20-40% off your effective costs without touching a single campaign setting.
- Test at least three thumbnail variants before scaling spend. The creative variance data makes it clear: thumbnail quality drives more performance variation than targeting, budget level, or genre combined.
- Check the 30-day daily sponsor trend before committing to a large campaign. If competition is rising, your historical CPP benchmarks may understate current costs by 10-20% or more -- plan budgets accordingly.
The removal of legacy user ads forced every advertiser onto Ads Manager, a market-shifting event that concentrated all spend into a single auction system and fundamentally changed the competitive statistics tracked in this report.
Now Roblox removed user ads and replaced them with Ads Manager -- the old system was flawed but at least accessible to small devs.
Roblox Removed the User Ads Feature
Roblox's Q4 2025 shareholder letter disclosed a 40% CPP reduction, 75% year-over-year ad revenue growth, and 27% verified 18+ users -- hard platform-level statistics that frame the market trends observed in independent tracking data.
Roblox documentation reference: Roblox Q4 2025 Shareholder Letter.
References