Microsoft updates Dev Center to make Windows in-app advertising easier to manage

Mark Coppock

Although we tend to like free apps, we don’t always enjoy the advertising that sometimes comes along with them. We might forget, however, that adding and managing ads can be a hassle for our favorite app developers. Microsoft hasn’t forgotten, however, and so they’ve made some changes to their toolkits to make creating, managing, and tracking ad impressions and revenue a bit easier.
Over on the Windows blog, Microsoft lays out a host of changes to their app advertising infrastructure, centered primarily around the Dev Center tool that now integrates the capabilities that were previously provided by pubCenter. The new Dev Center features provide some serious power to developers in managing their in-app advertising:

  1. Promote your app using Microsoft Advertising
  2. Monetize your app using the Microsoft ad control and using ad mediation
    1. Update your app to use the latest version of the Microsoft Universal Ad Client SDK
    2. Create ad units
    3. Add video Interstitial ads
    4. Add ad mediation
    5. Make changes needed for existing apps
    6. Add Microsoft ads to apps using non-managed code (e.g. C++)
    7. Use ads in Windows 8.0 and Windows Phone 8.0 apps
    8. Selecting an ad size for your apps
  3. View ad impressions and ad revenue reporting
  4. Configure the ad targeting to support COPPA requirements

In addition, some other new advertising features were released:

• Enable auto-update of the Microsoft Ad SDK
• Updates to ad mediation: new ‘ranking’ ordering and new SDK timeout parameter
• Two new ad networks added to mediation: AdDuplex for UWP (Windows 10) packages, and adding Vserv for Windows Phone 8.1

The blog post goes on to provide some fairly detailed instructions on how to utilize the new Dev Center functionality, and so it’s well worth a visit if you’re a Windows developer. Dev Center supports Windows 8.X, Windows Phone 8.X, and of course Windows 10 apps.