Suppression

What is suppression?

Suppression is the prevention of specific device IDs (IP addresses) from seeing an advertising campaign for an app an advertiser is promoting in a UA campaign. Usually, these devices are excluded from a campaign because they’ve already installed the app.

How using suppression can improve performance

When running UA campaigns, installs are counted only if the user downloads the app to her phone for the first time. Suppression prevents users who already have the app installed from being targeted by an advertiser’s campaign for the same app. Since the app can’t be installed twice, there is no logical reason to show an ad on a device where the app is already installed. This method conserves impressions by showing ads only to new potential users, which helps maximize the IPM (installs per 1k impressions).

Suppression list

A suppression list is an audience list that advertisers share with an ad network to enhance targeting and ROI during UA campaigns. The suppression list contains the IDs of the devices with the app already installed, so they won’t be targeted. 

There are 2 types of suppression lists: static and dynamic. 

• Static suppression list – all device IDs that previously interacted with an app.  The advertiser sends this list to the network
• Dynamic suppression list – all device IDs that installed the app after the UA campaign was launched. The advertiser sets this up with her attribution company 

Ideally, the static suppression list is updated with the dynamic suppression list in real time to understand which devices should not be targeted.

Learn how to define a suppression list using the ironSource Audience API.