Unless everyone else does it too
−75%
conversion value compared with bidding the same all day. Once competitors pile into the evening, the evening-heavy strategy is outbid there and buys far less.
- Uniform
- Time of day
Test your ad bidding strategy before you spend real money
Market Policy Simulator replays thousands of ad auctions so you can compare two bidding strategies side by side, and see how sure the result is.
Bid when your buyers buy
2.1×
the conversion value, from the same daily budget, when an online shop moves its bids into the evening, where shoppers convert three times as often.
- Return on ad spend
- 1.8 → 3.9
- Uniform
- Time of day
But the market decides
The same shop, two other markets. Every number comes from the simulator.
Don't run out of budget by noon
+35%
conversion value compared with spending at full speed: the same tight budget, paced so it lasts into the valuable evening.
- Unpaced
- Paced
How it works
-
Pick a market
Choose a simulated market: its shoppers, their hours and the competitors bidding against you.
-
Set two strategies
Keep one as the reference and change what you want to test: bids, hours, budget or pacing.
-
Run and compare
The simulator replays the market many times and shows which strategy wins, and how sure it is.
Ad auction terms, explained
Ad auction (second price)
Each time a page with an ad slot loads, advertisers bid for it in an auction that takes milliseconds. In a sealed-bid second-price auction nobody sees the other bids, the highest bid wins, and the winner pays the second-highest bid, or the reserve price (the floor the publisher sets) if that is higher. So bidding what an impression is worth to you is safe: you usually pay less.
- You $0.09
- Competitor 1 $0.06
- Competitor 2 $0.04
Hourly bid multipliers (dayparting)
Dayparting means bidding differently by time of day. A multiplier scales the base bid for each hour, up to a maximum bid. It pays when some hours bring shoppers who buy more often. It backfires when competitors raise the same hours: the extra spend then buys contested, expensive impressions, as in the −75% market above.
- Night ×0.6 · $0.018
- Daytime ×1 · $0.030
- Evening ×2 · $0.060
Daily budget and pacing
A daily budget caps what a campaign spends in a day. Without pacing, a campaign bids at full strength until the money runs out, sometimes before the best hours arrive. Pacing lowers bids while spending runs ahead of plan and raises them when it falls behind, so the budget lasts the day.
Win rate
The share of the auctions you enter that you win. Higher is not automatically better: winning every auction can mean overpaying for impressions that rarely convert. Some strategies adjust their bids hour by hour to hold a target win rate.
CPA and ROAS
Cost per acquisition (CPA) is spend divided by conversions: what one sale or sign-up costs you. Return on ad spend (ROAS) is conversion value divided by spend: earning $3 for every $1 spent is a ROAS of 3. The simulator reports both for every strategy.
Why one run is not enough
Ad markets are noisy: who shows up, who bids and who buys changes every day, so one lucky day can make a weak strategy look good. The simulator replays the same simulated market many times for both strategies and shows how much the result varies, so you can tell a real difference from chance.
See it on your own numbers
The tour runs these three experiments in your own account, then lets you change the market and the strategies.
Take the tour