I did some ads to my apps; the only information I get regarding how many people got to my app is from the sites where I advertised (Google, Facebook, etc...); and this is only showing how many people clicked the link.
I want info about the following:
How many people got to my app page - per each ad that I have
How many people downloaded the app - per each ad that I have
Can anyone assist?
What you are talking about is conversion tracking.
There's no easy way because you don't get stats from the app store page itself, so you have to do it like this:
when the user clicks your banner, record their device IP address in your database.
when they launch your app on their iPhone for the first time, make a call to your website using native code in your app and log the IP address again. If you get a match then you'll know that the user who clicked the banner is the same one who launched the app, therefore they must have just downloaded it from the app store.
It's not perfect because it won't work if there's a long time between them downloading and first launching the app (assuming they don't have a static IP), or if they download the app on a PC and then install it via iTunes later. It should work in a lot of cases though.
Some of the standard analytics packages have this capability already, for example Google/Admob supports tracking a user from clicking an Admob ad to launching the app in this way (Assuming you are using Google analytics in your app):
http://support.google.com/admob/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1704628
Related
iOS. I have a mobile web site and a mobile app for the same. i want the user to be able to navigate from web to my app through a link. Is it possible for this feature to be feasible when the app is not installed. I know i can use smart app banners when the app is already installed and this feature can be implemented then. But the main problem i am facing is when the user is asked to install the app (from smart app banners) for a particular page of my website. How can i automatically redirect the user to same page on my app from where he clicked the app banner on first launch of app ?
This is a problem that Branch, the company I'm working for, solves. It's actually fairly simple to explain, but quite a bit more tricky to implement yourself.
Apple doesn't currently allow you to persist information like that through an install (through the App Store), so you'll need an intermediate server. Now, depending on what devices you want to support, this gets more and more tricky. You mentioned you're only on iOS now, but if you expand to Android, this becomes even more complicated (with the fragmentation of Android devices and browsers, etc). For now, I'll just explain for iOS though. It's basically a two step process, starting with the smart banner on your mobile web page.
The smart banner, when clicked, will try to
* Launch the app if possible. We do this by trying to load via the app's URI scheme.
* If the URI Scheme fails (not installed), we send a device fingerprint to our servers based on IP, model, etc. and then send the user to the app store.
The second part is then within the app:
* When it launches, it needs to ask the server if it was launched via a link click. (whether directly into the app or through the app store and now into the app).
* It sends along a similar fingerprint, and then the server (if the device matches) will send back the relevant info (the page id, or whatever you use).
* If the page id is present, you need to present the view controller with that content to the user (you may need to persist this info in your app through a login, if it's behind an auth wall).
How can you solve this scenario:
User is using Safari on iOS. They click a link on a website that says
"View Profile on our app". The user does not have the app, they are
taken to the app store to download the app. After they open the app,
the app immediately loads the profile screen (instead of the main
screen).
Currently in order for us to solve this problem, when the app is installed we immediately open Safari to grab the session cookie, if it matches the one on the server we load the right screen. However, Apple is now rejecting our app (and others) for loading Safari at startup.
What is a valid solution that won't get rejected by Apple?
(Also note that we were exploring IDFA - which would have worked - but Apple is rejecting apps that use IDFA if the app isn't using Ads)
This is definitely possible without the IDFA.
Basically, create a URL endpoint on your server that will 302 to the App Store on GET. When a user clicks this link, collect IP Address, OS, OS version, device model, screen size and other parameters and store it as a browser fingerprint.
Then, after the user installs your app, send the same array of meta data to your server as a device fingerprint. Your server can then match this device fingerprint to the browser fingerprint. If there's a match, you can be very certain that the user originated from your link.
Just to give you an idea of numbers, we (at Branch) give this service away for free and now process hundreds of millions of these match queries per day. We've seen that if a user will install, 99% of them will do it within the first 60 minutes. Just empirically, we estimate that this mechanism, with a short window of 2 hours is very close to 100% accurate.
For an added benefit, if you collect IDFA, you can drop a cookie on the browser on redirect and then store the matched pair to the IDFA to create a semi-permanent alternative to the fingerprinting mechanism I mentioned above. If someone clicks your link again, and you've got a cookie stored in the browser, you'll know who they are when they send their IDFA back to your service on install because you've seen that story play out before.
The best solution requires IDFA, which you are in fact allowed to collect for the purpose of deferred deep linking. The "Apple IDFA Scare" was a bit overblown in the media, and Apple revised its T&Cs to make it more clear. Apple also allows you to collect IDFA if you are an advertiser, for attributing installs, or for attributing post-install actions. In other words, you don't have serve ads in your own app in order to collect IDFAs.
Here's a link to the current Apple policy (https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=08282014a ), and this article from AdExchanger goes into a little more detail (http://www.adexchanger.com/mobile/apple-throws-a-bone-to-app-marketers-blesses-idfa-for-attribution/ )
I setup a Mobile App using the developer's panel and added all the correct information as mentioned in the tutorial video on the Facebook SDK page.
It's a native iOS app so I supplied the bundle ID and the App Store ID. I've installed the SDK and Facebook is registering installs whenever I run it on my device.
However once I tried to use the "Promote" feature to setup install ads it keeps getting rejected by Facebook on the grounds that the URL is bad. The URL works fine as I've tested it multiple times. The URL is generated by Facebook itself using the App ID.
I've tried submitting it again after changing the creative, but I'm assuming I've been blacklisted since it immediately is disapproved.
What can I do?
Is your app limited to a certain region or country?
My ad was also disapproved and this is what I got:
"The destination URL of this ad violates our Ad Guidelines or could not be reviewed. Please check the URL you have submitted to ensure that it is free of any spelling errors and that it complies with our Advertising Guidelines. Please note that all sites must be viewable and functioning properly, regardless of the viewer's location. Additionally, sites are prohibited from linking to proprietary file types (.pdf, .doc, etc,) initiating automatic downloads, or trapping a user's browser in any way (e.g., pop-ups of any kind).
"
In my case the only logical explanation would be the availability of the app, as it is only available in one country. I link directly to the app store so that should not be a problem...
Sorry for my reply, i know it's not very helpful, but there is so little info on the web about it. I need to do detective work in order to understand what is happening.
I had the exact same thing. I think Facebook changed a ton of stuff in their ads dashboard. I created a new ad yesterday and it was finally approved. Try again.
I have recently started programming in iOS. I found this really interesting way of showing an Ad in the Flixster app. It randomly pops up a latest movie banner and asks to watch trailer or skip to continue using the app. How is it actually implemented? how can they be pushing a variable screen (may be a view) at runtime? Every time you open the app, you see a different banner.
I work for Flixster and here's how we do it:
Every time the app starts or resumes, the app pings our API to ask for what ads should be shown. Our api gives our app the url of the image to be shown, as well as the click-through url, which can be a regular url, or a custom link to one of our native pages like viewing a trailer, or a movie info page.
We have an admin tool where we can upload the ad image, modify the properties of the ads, or remove old ads and add new ads. However, we've recently started using 3rd party Ad networks like DFP and Admob (acquired by Google) to take over this management.
I'm trying to figure out whether the users I get from ads will buy in-app purchases frequently enough to justify the cost.
Is there any way an iOS app can tell whether the user has clicked on an AdMob ad in the past? Their Download API only seems to show aggregate data. I'm open to using any other network if they let me do this!
If there's anything in the HTTP request from an ad which would give me the user's magical ISU string, I'd be happy to bounce ads through my own server and implement my own tracking.
Thanks!
AdMob doesn't have any way of querying for this.
I decided to bounce ads through my own server and have the app query it later. If the server finds an ad click which came from the:
Same IP address
Same Device type
Same system version
it will tell the app that it came from a paid click.
Of course the problem with this is that I lose data on some unknown number of ad-click installations. I'd like to know how many I'm losing, but I don't know if there's a way to use AdMob's app conversion tracking together with ads which go to arbitrary URLs.