Setting Up the Rotation of RotationGroups

Standard ads have many settings you can use to fine tune how your creatives are served and to whom they are delivered. Among the important decisions to be made for each ad is which of the 5 types of rotations should be used to determine which creative to serve. Putting these ads together through the API, where they are known not as standard ads but as RotationGroups, requires the use of certain fields for some types of rotations and not others. It is important to know which fields you are expected to use and when.

The RotationGroup Fields

The RotationGroup object has two fields you need to use, rotationType and creativeOptimizationEnabled. The rotationType field represents which of the 5 rotation types to use, but there are actually only four unique values. The optimized rotation type is a type of weighted rotation, and as such shares the same rotationType value as the weighted rotation. The creativeOptimizationEnabled field is used only to distinguish between a weighted rotation, where it is false, and an optimized rotation, where it is set to true. All other rotations leave this value as false.

The CreativeAssignment Fields

The CreativeAssignment object that represents each creative in a rotation has two fields that help set up a rotation, sequence and weight. The sequence field is required only for the sequential rotation type, and values should not be set for the others. The weight field is required for both the weighted and the optimized rotations. Weighted rotations use this value directly to determine the serve percentage of each ad, but optimized rotations will modify the values. An initial value is required for optimized rotations. For the best performance of the optimization process, the weight value for optimized rotations should be set to the minimum creative weight set at the Campaign level in the CreativeOptimizationConfiguration object.

Which Fields Are Required For Each Rotation Type

	rotationType	creativeOptimizationEnabled	sequence	weight
Random	Yes (1)	No	No	No
Sequential	Yes (2)	No	Yes	No
Weighted	Yes (3)	No	No	Yes
Best Performing	Yes (4)	No	No	No
Optimized	Yes (3)	Yes	No	Yes*

* The best practice recommendation for setting up optimized rotations is to always set the initial weight for each creative added to the rotation to the minimum optimized serve percent value set at the campaign level.

Using the handy table above as a reference, you should be able to take advantage of the rotation types DoubleClick for Advertisers has to offer. If you have any questions about how to set these rotations up or other questions about managing your ads through the API in general, please bring them to our forum.

– Joseph DiLallo, the DFA API Team