Submitting your app and configuring ad mediation (Windows Phone Store dashboard)

Once you’ve built your app to include all of the ad networks you may want to use, and tested it to ensure everything’s working, you’re ready to submit the app. During the submission process, you can configure the ad mediation behavior you'd like to see. You'll be able to adjust this later without having to make code changes or submit new packages.

Configuring ad network behavior

When you upload your packages, Dev Center automatically detects that you're using ad mediation and identifies which ad networks you’re using. On the package upload page, you’ll see an Ad mediation configuration section. This is where you’ll configure your mediation logic. The first time you submit your app, you’ll create a baseline configuration. After that's set up, you can add market-specific configurations to take advantage of specific ad networks’ strengths in different markets.

There are three different parts involved in setting your configuration: refresh rate, mediation distribution, and required parameters for each network.

First, set the refresh rate to determine the length of the mediation cycle (how frequently new ads should be shown). The duration must be between 30 and 120 seconds.

Note  If you've already configured a refresh rate in any of your ad network portals, make sure you set the same refresh rate here.

Next, you'll need to indicate how often each network should be used.

You can choose to spread requests equally across all of your ad networks. Otherwise, you'll need to configure each ad network individually. If you aren’t going to spread the requests equally, you'll need to select one of the following options for each ad network:

• Percentage: The number you choose (between 10% and 100%) indicates the percentage of time that this ad network will be called as the app's first choice in a mediation cycle. The total percentages you set for all ad networks must add up to exactly 100%.
• Backup:: Indicates that this ad network should be called only if none of the ad networks with a designated percentage can provide an ad. This is equivalent to setting the percentage at 0%.
• Do not use: Indicates that this ad network will never be called. The assemblies for the ad network will remain in the package, but the mediator will not attempt to invoke them. You can set this option in market-specific configurations to exclude ad networks that are known to perform poorly in, or don’t support, a certain market.

Finally, you’ll need to enter the required parameters for each ad network. A list of these parameters can be found in Selecting and managing your ad networks.

Reviewing reports

To review ad mediation reports, go to the Reports section in Dev Center and click Ad mediation.

Four reports are provided:

• Ad mediator fill rate: This report shows the effective fill rate and the unmediated fill rate for either one app or all apps. The unmediated fill rate indicates the success of the first ad request in each mediation cycle (30-120 seconds). The effective fill rate indicates the actual success in displaying an ad for all mediation cycles, including when backup ad networks are called.
• Ad provider fill rate: This report shows the actual fill rate by ad network across all ad requests, as measured by ad mediation. Note  The information in this report is based on the ad mediator ad SDK measurements, and may differ from the information reported by each of the ad networks. This report can help you understand general ad network trends. For more detailed information, including eCPM and country breakdown, we recommend using the reports provided by each ad network.
• Configuration adoption rate: This report shows the number of devices that successfully consumed a new or updated mediation configuration. Whenever you create a new configuration, or modify an existing one, you can use this report to track how many devices are using the latest configuration.
• Mediation error breakdown: This report provides error statistics for failure cases in each mediation cycle. You can use this report to identify potential implementation errors that impact mediation cycles. Note  An error that often occurs with ad mediation is AdSdkTimeout. Although this error is expected occasionally, if you are seeing this often in comparison to the number of ad requests reported by the ad network, you may want to adjust the timeout values for the ad networks that are showing this error.

Optimizing ad mediation after the app has been published

If you want to adjust your ad mediation for a specific app, you can do so at any time without having to resubmit the app. This is useful if you’ve already added ad networks into your app that you hadn’t previously set up accounts for, or if you’re finding that one ad network is not able to fill ads reliably in specific markets.

To make changes, view the app details page in Dev Center and click Ad mediation. You can make changes to your baseline configuration as well as to market-specific configurations. You can also add or remove market-specific configurations if desired.

Example scenarios

You can configure your ad networks in a variety of ways to support different goals and scenarios. The examples below show how you might configure your ad mediation when you've included four ad networks. We'll use Microsoft Advertising, Inneractive, InMobi, and AdDuplex as our example networks here.

• Example 1: You want to find out the fill rate and cost per thousand views (eCPM) of all the networks, before starting to optimize.

  To begin, set each network to use an equal distribution of mediation traffic. You can review each ad network's reports later to help determine the highest performing ad networks for each market.

  After a few days or weeks, you'll want to check the fill rate and eCPM in each of the ad network portals. This will help you determine the best ad networks for each market. You can then make adjustments for specific markets (or overall) without having to submit new packages.

• Example 2: You want to use Microsoft Advertising first whenever possible. If Microsoft Advertising can't provide an ad, you're happy to use any of your other ad networks as backup, with no preference for one over another.

  Ad network	Configuration
  Microsoft Advertising	100%
  Inneractive	Backup
  InMobi	Backup
  AdDuplex	Backup

   

• Example 3: You generally want to use Microsoft Advertising first. If Microsoft Advertising can't provide an ad, you want to make sure Inneractive is called before AdDuplex. You don't want to use InMobi at all right now, even though you might want to use it later.

  Ad network	Configuration
  Microsoft Advertising	90%
  Inneractive	10%
  AdDuplex	Backup
  InMobi	Do not use

   

• Example 4: You want to use Microsoft Advertising and Inneractive equally, so that there's a greater variety of ads in your app than you'd see with just one network always called first. If neither ad network is available, you’ll randomly choose from your other ad networks as backup.

  Ad network	Configuration
  Microsoft Advertising	50%
  Inneractive	50%
  InMobi	Backup
  AdDuplex	Backup