Attribution for Mobile App Tracking for iOS and Google Play

What is up Appnation. It is Steve P. young founder of Appmasters.com the place you go when you want action packed content in the app business. And today I want to cover, if you're having trouble figuring out where your app downloads are coming from, I'm going to show you exactly where to find it on iOS, through the app store connect and through the Google play development platform. So without further do. Well, let's get started.

We're going to go into the app analytics section of app store connect, and then you're going to pick the app that you want to focus on our guys. So I'm in. Apps are connected. And then underneath the app analytics, and what I've done is selected the app that I want to focus on. I've blocked out the app name and the company profile because this is a client's data and I don't want to share who it is and exactly what they've been able to achieve as well.

But I wanted to show you real life data. And I chose this app because it's a great example of an app where we ran the free promotional campaign. On now we drove over 6,000 downloads and you can see the data. We ran it Friday, April 10th we got about 1700 downloads and another $1,700 no, we got 3,500 downloads on the 10th of the day. The first day we ran the campaign, and the second day we're able to get 1700 downloads.

So it's a great campaign. I've been talking up all the time and we drove close to 6,000 downloads without spending any money on marketing. So let's go into some of the sources. Now, if you don't have any app attribution tools, some of the popular ones as apps flyer or adjust, this is the freeway of doing it. Again, remember this number about 6,000 downloads, close to 7,000 downloads. So we're going to go under sources and here's where you can see where the downloads are coming from.

So here, app store search, you can do that. And this is primarily through organic app store search or through search ads. So they've lumped it all into one. Apple has, here's app store, browse people, just searching for the app through there, and then app refer. So that means downloads that came from another app. Okay. And then web refer, obviously from a website. Okay. These are the product views. You can do app units as well.

So here you can see. The closest 6,000 downloads that came in through this particular campaign and the sources. So app store browse 85% we've got about 3000 that came through app store browse. We got about 418 they came in through app refer, but 51 through web refer. And then AppSource search about sitting for downloads on the day that we ran the campaign. So not completely accurate because most of these downloads came because the campaign we ran.

Okay. So if you go under app refers, and this is the beauty of this campaign, you can see that most of these downloads came through, apps gone free. Now, app advice is a site that I always tell you guys to pitch. They run an app called AppScan free, and that's where most of those downloads are going to come from. But Apple is not able to pick up. All of it. And so you're going to lose a little bit. Right now it's only reporting about 656 so really about 1% of the overall 6,000 plus downloads that we got.

But I'll give you some indication of where the downloads are coming from. Okay. It's not the best, but some, and it's free web refers. So these are things where it's coming from the, the obviously the web, and here's where you can see that app advice. We're getting some downloads through there. Alright. And then campaigns. Now you can do a set up a campaign here so you can generate a campaign link. App advice doesn't allow you to actually send these type of unique links because they want to see them more organic.

They don't want people tracking it unless you pay for it. Here, you can put your campaign name so you can say free promotional. Campaign, and then there you have the actual app. Now, if you just remember this CT, that should be enough, I think, but this is a great way of creating your own campaign as well. Okay. The other thing I want to show you is if you go under the metrics tab. And you go under app units here under app units, you want to do the add filter.

And what I like to do is do source site. So app store search. Now if you really just wanted to see organic downloads, how well are you doing from an organic perspective? This is my favorite way of doing it. So you go to app units and just filter by app store search. Again, if you're running search ads, you're going to find these search ads. Downloads in there, but it's a great way of just seeing, Hey, are my ESO efforts really paying off all the strategies that Steve has been sharing with me?

Are they really paying off? And that's where you would find the downloads that are coming through app store search. I'm going to take that out. The app store search. The other things you can do, you can also view by region territory. So if you want to see if you take it off, you gain some tons of downloads. You can see if they're coming from the U S Canada, Europe, Asia, you can even get more in depth if you click into any of these as well.

And so if you really want to get more in depth and go like territory, for example. You can do that. So that's what gives you, breaks it down by country. So territory is the country. The region is sort of the continents, the different parts of the world. But if you go into territory, I'll tell you the exact companies or exact countries, and sometimes what we've noticed is you'll get a whole lot of downloads from China.

It doesn't really mean much. They tend to be not good downloads. I don't know what happens, but a lot of people have reported to me like, Hey, where are all these Chinese downloads coming from? I have no idea. Okay. But this is how you sort of break it down. Again, this is the freeway of doing it. So if you want the paid way, go really look at adjust and AppsFlyer. And also, if you want Facebook analytics, that's actually good enough because a lot of you will actually just be running Facebook ads.

So once you have Facebook attribution in place, that Facebook SDK, then you know how many downloads you're getting through your ads, and that's all you might need. Because if you're not running multichannel advertising and you're only running Facebook ads, well the Facebook SDK may be the only app attribution you may need. Alright, now let's go into Google play here. You're going to pick the app that you want to focus on, and then you're going to go under user acquisition and acquisition reports.

Now, Google has all the downloads and the app store visitors. First time installers, the day one, day seven for day 15. They have all this data in there. Okay? And so this is all the retain. So this is sort of your retention rate for day one, day seven, day 15 and day 30 this is your retention rate, okay? Now you can then see from all the acquisition debt channels, here's your overall downloads, and here's the sort of the retention rate.

It's a really decent retention here. As you can see, 50% day, 30 retention. You can see how many downloads are gained through the Google play organic search. So this is through search. If you click on this, you'll actually see the keywords. I won't do it because I don't want to reveal any data here, but you can do that by clicking here and you'll see all the exact keywords that are driving the downloads. So really cool data there.

Explore obviously people through the suggested apps or other parts of the Google play store that people are finding your apps. That's where the Explorer is, the Google ad words. So this client is actually running some Google ads campaigns and they're able to drive downloads there. That's what you see, that Google search. So this is the web search there and people are finding the app through there. And then third party refers.

This is either through a deep link into Google play or third party refer. So there is where you find it. The other thing you can do, just like on iOS, is create a campaign code. And so I've done that for you. This is very similar. If you guys are familiar with Google analytics, you can do that with that. And so here's how you set up that parameter. Let's say you want to, I don't know, run an email campaign, right? And I've kind of picked this, the call map here, but this is the link that you have.

That's the call map. And here's what I have upended. So I did the UTM underscore campaign and I said Facebook ads, because that's what I want to show. So that's what it has in there, and that's how you can then see some of that data populate right here. And if you have more than one campaign, then it'll start showing up under neath here. All right guys. That's it. That's the freeway of doing app attribution. Now, if you want another freeway, like I said, install the Facebook SDK, because in the beginning you're probably just going to be running Facebook ads and you really just want to know the difference between organic reach and Facebook ads reach, and you can get that data through Facebook platform and you can Piecing things together using what I just showed through the app stores itself and what Facebook is reporting.

Now, if you want to take a step further and you have some multichannel advertising that you're going to do, we'll definitely take a look at adjust.com or appsflyer.com. I'm more biased through adjust because they've been a partner of ours and a sponsor of our virtual summits, so adjust.com if you want to do multichannel advertising and get that attribution in place, and within these paid attribution platforms, you'll be able to see organic.

You'll be able to see search ads. You'll be able to get more in depth data than what the app stores are providing. For you guys. That's it. Hope you enjoyed this video. If you got any topics that you want me to cover in a future video, please leave a comment below and sure. You like this video and subscribe. Lastly, be safe, be kind, and I'll see you next time. Peace.