Microsoft is releasing a major update for its “Promote Your App” ad campaigns. The “Promote Your App” ad campaign is a feature that allows you to create ad campaigns for apps submitted within DevCenter and eventually grow your audience and engage with them.
Using “Promote your App,” developers can get hands on some advanced targeting capabilities, to advertise apps among Windows users.
We are happy to announce the launch of universal campaigns that will deliver your ads across Microsoft premium surfaces such as MSN.com, Outlook.com, and Skype, as well as games like the Microsoft solitaire collection.
With universal campaigns, Microsoft believes your app promotion will get a wider reach since services like MSN, Skype, Outlook and Solitaire collection are used by millions of users daily, giving you a better chance to showcase your awesome app when they use these services.
Here are some more reasons as to why should you use universal campaigns?
- Second, your ad campaigns will now get a very wide variety of touch points. Studies have shown that media-mix models can fetch your company multi-fold revenues. In the context of app promotions, it is the app installs and app engagements that can grow multi-fold.MSN is primarily used in the context of news and entertainment, while Skype is used for personal communication and Outlook is used for email. Many Windows customers spend a fair amount of time playing popular games like Microsoft Solitaire. Your ad can now capture the attention of users in all these different situations, as well as improve recall and conversion rates.
- Finally, the allocation of budget among the Microsoft surfaces is driven by powerful machine-learning algorithms. These algorithms start with finding the right set of users who should be exposed to your ad campaign, and then measure the effectiveness of each surface to adjust the target user profiles and budget allocations. Rest assured, these algorithms are working to give you the best possible ROI.
About a week ago, Microsoft introduced campaign APIs for the Windows Store. If you are an app developer or a media agency, you can use these REST APIs to promote apps and manage ad campaigns easily.
How to get started with Universal Campaigns?
- All campaigns that use auto-targeting will be universal campaigns by default. To use auto-targeting, make sure Automatic is selected for the Audience section of your campaign settings in the Dev Center dashboard.
- If you wish to create a manually targeted campaign, make sure you choose Universal for the Surface setting in the Audience section of your campaign.
App developers and organizations using DevCenter can follow the prerequisite steps listed here.
Detailed documentation for accessing the REST APIs along with code samples is available here.
