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May 17, 2017
PC

Monetize your app: Know the user to serve better targeted ads

Knowing the users of your app leads to much better monetization when serving ads. The Microsoft Advertising ID is a unique identifier for millions of Windows app users. These users are also exposed to ads on websites that they browse. By helping ad networks identify the same user across apps and web, the app developer can monetize much better through ads.

For example, ad networks can serve re-targeting ads across the two platforms and help advertisers more precisely target their audience. Linking user IDs across app and web is a simple one-step process: in your app’s workflow, at any point where the user navigates from the app to an external website.

Some suggested ways of doing this are:

  1. Open your webpage from the app once it’s installed –> invoke the default browser with your webpage –> set the destination URL in the link below.
  2. Open a useful webpage from your app – other app developers have used “leader boards” as a potential destination location for the link below.

Add the following URL as the first click through:

https://dpa-fwl.microsoft.com/redirect.html?referrerID=
<MicrosoftAdvertisingID>&src=<Your_App’s_Store_ID>&rurl=<Destination_URL

You can get the user’s Microsoft advertising ID by following the method described here. Assign your app’s Store ID to the ‘src’ parameter, and the destination URL (where you want to redirect the user to) in an encoded format under the ‘rurl’ parameter.

Here is a sample URL with all fields populated:

https://dpa-fwl.microsoft.com/redirect.html?referrerID=c4d4a9d5413
b4275059733abe0857827&src=9wzdncrfhv61&rurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.bing.com

When this URL is called, ad networks get the user’s Microsoft Advertising ID and can link it to other IDs for the same user maintained on their end through a server side sync process.

Stay tuned over the next few weeks for additional tips to increase ad monetization.