How to Track and Attribute Mobile App Downloads for iOS and Android

[00:00:00]what is up app nation it is TP young founder of at masters calm 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 ado let's get started we're gonna 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 alright guys so I'm in app store connect them 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 do 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 day that we ran it Friday April 10th we got about 1,700 downloads and another $1,700 no we got 3500 downloads on the 10th of the day the first day we ran the campaign and the second day we're able to get 1,700 downloads so it's a great campaign I've been talking it up all the time and we drove close six six thousand 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 free way of doing it again remember this number about six thousand downloads close to 7,000 downloads so we're gonna go under sources and here's where you can see where the downloads are coming from so here apps are 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 the app through there and then a prefer so that means downloads that came from another app okay and then web briefer obviously from a website okay these are the product views you can do app units as well so here you can see the close to six thousand downloads that came in through this particular campaign and the sources so app store browse 85% we got about three thousand that came through App Store brows we got about four hundred eighteen that came in through a prefer about fifty one through web refer and then app store search about setting 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 a pre first and this is the beauty of this campaign you can see that most of these downloads came through apps con free now app advice is the site that I always tell you guys to pitch they've got an app called apps con free and that's where most of those downloads are gonna come from but apples not able to pick up all of it and so you're gonna lose a little bit right now it's only we're putting about six hundred and fifty six 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 not the best but some and it's free web refers so these are things where it's coming from the obviously the web and here's where you can see that app advice we're getting some downloads through there right and then campaigns now you can do a set up a campaign here so you can generate a new campaign link app advice doesn't allow you to actually send these type of unique links because they want to see 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 our 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 gonna find these search ad downloads in there but it's a great way of just saying 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 gonna 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've taken off your game son tons of downloads you can see if they're coming from the US 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 territories the country the region is sort of the continents in 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 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 ok but this is how you sort of break it down again this is the free way of doing it so if you want the paid way go really look at adjust and apps flyer 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 multi-channel advertising and you're only running Facebook ads well the Facebook SDK may be the only app attribution you may need all right now let's go into Google Play here you're gonna pick the app that you want to focus on and then you're going to go under user acquisition and position reports now Google has all the downloads and the app store visitors first-time installers the day 1 day 7 for day 15 they have all this data in there ok and so this is all the retain so this is sort of your retention rate for day 1 day 7 day 15 and day 30 this is your retention rate ok now you can then see from all the acquisition net 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 you're getting 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 to reveal any data here but you can do that by clicking here and you'll see all the 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 Adwords so this client is actually running some Google ad campaigns and they're able to drive downloads there that's what you see that Google search so this is the web search then people are finding the app through there and then third party refers visit either through a deep link into Google Play or a third party wafer 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 appended so I did the UTM underscore campaign and I said Facebook Ads because that's what I wanted 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 underneath here alright guys that's it that's the free way of doing a pat tribution now if you want another free way like I said install the Facebook SDK because in the beginning you're probably just gonna 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 try to start piecing things together using what I just showed through the App Store's itself and what Facebook is reporting now if you want to take a step further and you have some multi-channel advertising that you're gonna do we'll definitely take a look at a just calm or apps feiyr.com I'm more biased through adjust because they've been a partner of ours and a sponsor of our virtual summits so just calm if you want to do multi-channel 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 make sure you like this video and subscribe lastly be safe be kind and I'll see you next time peace you