

The stats iPhone developers are missing: Sales Conversion and Referral Source - prbuckley
http://blog.appsto.re/the-stats-iphone-developers-are-missing-sales
How many people in the hackernews community would find this tool useful?
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Timothee
Appsto.re bothers me a lot so far.

I say so far, because they seem to offer very little (the screenshots show
number of clicks, regions and referrals), but in return, they put their iTunes
affiliate link: from what I gather, that get them 5% of all iTunes purchases
for that account in the following 4 months (or until another affiliate link is
used).

Honestly, that's disproportionate. One could get the 5% themselves and have
the same level of analytics just by setting up Google Analytics and a
LinkShare program. An hour's worth of work.

Sure, they provide a free service and deserve to be paid for it. I just have
the feeling that their reasoning went the other way: "let's put our affiliate
link everywhere. Now how do we do that?". The fact that their offering is very
light for now seems to indicate that I'm right about that.

~~~
ohad
Hi guys, many name is Ohad and I'm one of the guys behind appsto.re

There is a very wide mis-understanding of LinkShre, Apple, etc, here are a few
tasty facts:

* Apple will give its affiliate partners 5% out of their 30% profit. For a 99c app, that's 1.5c, that is not money on any scale. * This money comes out of Apple's pocket, remember? 99.9% of developers don't setup a relationship with Linkshare and claim that money. * Linkshare is a horrific 1990's-stlye company, where the site is down more than it should be, the reports are extremely hard to consume. This explains why its not worth for the average or even the successful developer to work with them for that measly commission.

Now, as for appsto.re: * We built significant infra-structure around
integrating with Linkshare, sucking out the info, generating the various
reports (many of which are far from trivial). * No, you can't just 'hookup
Google-Analytics and Linkshare in 1 hour', it doesn't work like that,
Linkshare doesn't want to be your friend, they won't really tell you how/what
got sold, and it will require significant research and development.

In short, we built what we believe is an awesome service for iPhone
developers/marketers, its turn-key so they don't need to bother with anything.
We've been beta-testing with hundreds of developers, they are all happy to the
roof, because this allows them to focus on their app and its marketing.

How do we make money? Not from Linkshare that's for sure, we're going to be
Freemium.

~~~
Timothee
Is it really 5% of their 30% profit and not 5% of the overall price?

I'm really curious because I don't know all the details of LinkShare but the
way I understood it, it's the same program for apps and music and everything
else in the iTMS. Thus, I'd be surprised that the 5% is of Apple's profit
since either:

-that would make apps different from music,

-or it would let us know the profit made by Apple on music as well, which I always thought was unknown.

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DenisM
You can also roll your own with linkshare affiliate program and a URL
shortener. These guys need to provide (emphasize if the already provide it)
some better analytic tools.

Most traffic still comes from within the app store, however, and these users
are non-traceable as far as I know.

~~~
prbuckley
We are working on new features everyday. I promise you that the analytics is
going to get better and better.

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theappfarm
How is this different than using bit.ly?

~~~
prbuckley
I am one of the founders behind appsto.re. The analytics appsto.re is
providing focuses on sales conversions per click for iPhone apps. Bit.ly does
not do this. Bit.ly will give you referral sources but does not provide any
transparency into what happens when someone lands on your iTunes app page,
appsto.re analytics can tell you if a click actually converted into a sale.

I hope this answers your question.

~~~
theappfarm
OK but to clarify, a developer could just create a linkshare URL and then drop
those links into bit.ly to track clicks and then conversions on those clicks?

You say you track conversions by source but I assume you have to have 1 URL
per source correct? If this is the case you are no different than what I
suggest above but you take a 5% cut instead of the developer getting it.

~~~
prbuckley
You are correct, a developer could get a linkshare url and drop it into
bit.ly. Then they would have to do a lot more work to get the bit.ly click
data to overlap with the linkshare data. We do some other statistcal analysis
to be sure we aren't counting other app sales in your data. There is actually
a substantial amount of work behind getting this to all work smoothly.

We see appsto.re as being a turn key no headache solution. We do the work of
making sure things don't break, adding new analytics tools and handling all
the details that it doesn't make sense for a single developer to worry about.

Shane Crawford has a great two part blog post if you really want to implement
this yourself ...

[http://shanecrawford.org/2009/119/tracking-appstore-
conversi...](http://shanecrawford.org/2009/119/tracking-appstore-conversions-
part-1/)

Thanks for commenting.

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credo
Has anyone tried to setup an affiliate program with Apple directly. That way,
developers can get the 5% commission themselves and also track sales
conversions (without going through a third party that pockets the 5%
commission)

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jerguismi
If I could just find out about this about an hour earlier :D (Shameless plug:
<http://appsto.re/splitmyballs>)

