For years you had an ability to target campaigns by app’s category in the store. This was straightforward at first, but as time went by two issues materialized and got deeper and deeper with each new (sub)platform added to the Windows ecosystem:
- There’s no 1:1 mapping between some categories in different versions of the Windows Store. So targeting campaigns across sub-platform boundaries was problematic.
- Some categories look like a good target for your campaigns, but are actually very niche. This resulted in campaigns that weren’t reaching anywhere close to the exposure you were looking for.
So we have finally decided to address both issues at once, as well as create the basis for all the possible future changes in the store. We’ve grouped all the categories and their variants into 5 app categories and 5 game categories. Our goal was to group them based on the type of user these apps attract, rather than just “genre”. I think we’ve managed to come up with a pretty good representation of the types of users you would want to acquire via campaigns.
So our current category list is…
Apps
- Lifestyle
- News & Entertainment
- Family & Education
- Social
- Tools & Utilities
Games
- Action
- Board & Casual
- Family & Education
- Strategy & Role playing
- Sports, Fighting, Simulation
We’ve remapped all of the currently active campaigns to this new category structure.
We hope you like the results you get and we are definitely sure this change will bring more clarity, as well as result in fewer issues with category targeting.
