If you’re managing advertisements for any Windows Store apps, the newest update to the suite of Windows Store developer tools is going to a big help to you. The Windows Store is adding several new features to its advertising toolkit, and it’s beginning to merge the pubCenter service into Dev Center, creating a more cohesive experience for developers who need to streamline the work they’re putting in advertising.
Up until now, pubCenter was used to create advertisements, and submitting/managing your app would then be handled with the Dev Center, With this new update, the Dev Center is going to take on a lot of the responsibility that pubCenter used to have. As pubCenter is being phased out, Microsoft asks that developers start to use Dev Center for managing all of your advertising (with the exception of ad payment information, which should be handled in pubCenter for now.)
Anyone from this point on who makes an app on the Dev Center for the first time will have a linked pubCenter account made for them automatically, where they can manage payment information. For developers who still need to link their pubCenter and Dev Center accounts, they should have been automatically migrated and merged (assuming the two accounts are both associated with the same Microsoft Account.)
Along with the changes linking together Dev Center and pubCenter, some altogether new additions are either rolling out soon, or already implemented. For developers creating content for children under 13, Microsoft is implementing a COPPA (Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act) setting this September where developers, in compliance with COPPA, can choose to have the ads on their app be targeted for a younger audience.
Finally, already live on the Windows Store is the new campaign tracking feature. This feature allowed advertisers to directly look at where customers have been referred from. With this new features, developers will be able to view at page visits and downloads, as well as seeing how many of those customers downloaded the app within 24 hours of visiting an app’s page on the Window’s Store.
