Announcing Microsoft’s Ad Mediation Service
In-app advertising continues to represent over one-third of the revenue that developers make from writing apps for the Microsoft Windows platform. As part of our continuous commitment to maximize developer monetization through ads, today we are excited to announce Microsoft’s ad mediation service, a federated cloud based ad mediation service designed to help app developers maximize their ad revenue. The ad mediation service along with the Microsoft Advertising SDK are the two key components of Microsoft’s new ad monetization platform that dynamically optimizes ad network configurations to drive the highest yield for the developers and deliver innovative ad experiences for consumers.
Microsoft’s ad mediation service is now available to all developers through the Dev Center.
This service enables developers to maximize their revenue by serving ads on their application. The service works with a variety of ad networks that serve ads in various formats (banner, interstitial video, interstitial banner, native). This helps a developer to get the maximum yield from enabling ads on apps written on the Microsoft platform.
The service is an SSP (supply side platform) focused on ensuring developers get maximum fill rate and revenue from showing ads within their apps. The ad mediation service has several advantages for a developer when compared to alternative methods for serving ads from different networks.
| Microsoft ad mediation service | Client side mediation | Ad network SDK integration | |
| SDK support | Single SDK | Multiple SDK | Multiple SDK |
| Yield Optimization | Auto | Manual | Manual |
| Provisioning with Ad Networks | Auto | Manual | Manual |
| Unified Reporting including all participating ad networks | Yes | No | No |
| Unified Payout including all participating ad networks | Yes | No | No |
The picture below gives a view of the capabilities that the ad mediation service provides. With features such as risk and fraud detection, sending richer signals to advertisers and reliable reporting, the service is geared towards ensuring developers get the highest ROI for their ad placements. The choice of ad networks that offer ads in different formats and different markets is a number that will continue to grow beyond those listed in the diagram.
Fig 1. Our growing ecosystem of ad networks including Microsoft house ads, community ads and app install ads
Enabling ad mediation using the Microsoft advertising SDK
With the ad mediation service, developers need to integrate with only the Microsoft Advertising SDK. Developers no longer need to integrate with different ad networks individually by incorporating their SDK nor do they have to individually go to the ad networks to provision their ad units. One of the greatest benefits of this system is that as Microsoft adds newer ad networks to the service, developers’ applications will update automatically.
The ad mediation service is available to developers of UWP (Universal Windows Platform) applications built using the latest version of the Microsoft Advertising SDK (10.0.2 or higher).
Maximize the yield for your apps through auto-optimization
The ad mediation service uses machine learning algorithms to select the best possible ads from the available ad networks to ensure highest yield for the developers.
Microsoft will auto-optimize for best possible yield for the developer. The yield optimization algorithm uses past performance, app information, user context and other parameters to compute the best yield at a per-ad call level.
A developer can also manually configure the ad networks to serve ads on a given ad unit. These selections can be done across all markets or can be configured to target specific markets.
Developers can learn more about configuring their ad unit for optimal yield here.
Explore how the ad networks are performing for you
Developers now get a unified analytics and payments across all ad networks in Dev Center.
There are enhancements in the advertising performance reports that give developers clear insights into how each ad network is performing across different user markets and ad formats.
The new user experience for analytics also provides greater transparency and reliability. The developer can now see the last known good date for data from a given ad network and is also informed about delays in reporting.
Developers can also use the ads performance reporting API to programmatically access their reporting data and build their own internal dashboards.
Developers can learn more about the new experience around analytics here.
We welcome you to try Microsoft’s ad mediation service. All your UWP applications are now auto-upgraded to this new experience. We look forward to hearing your feedback for continued improvements.
Please reach us at [email protected] with your questions and comments.
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