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I recently learned that you need the FB SDK in your iOS app if you want to promote it on FB or Insta. So I guess most apps doing social marketing have the SDK.

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This is not true.

Are you sure? Seem to recall needing FB SDK to manage marketing pixels that provide detail on marketing campaign analytics. If you’re spending money on those platforms to drive traffic you’re going to want to optimize your spend and see performance. To do that I believe you need the FB sdk - are you saying there’s an alternative or are you saying “just don’t optimize performance”.

Can't you optimize ad performance by generating unique URLs for each campaign and then counting the number of clicks/installs per campaign on your own infrastructure?

“Can” is true but not the question at hand!

If Facebook, which charges money for advertising, let go of controlling that tracking relationship, they’d lose a lot of money. So they won’t.

Doesn't Facebook charge you for clicks regardless? Given the SDK is open-source and is embedded in an app controlled by the developer, there's nothing preventing them from modifying the SDK to report false clicks if Facebook actually relied on the SDK to report ad metrics for billing purposes.

Hmm, strange then. We tried it just recently and it would not let us create Insta ads w/o the FB SDK. Can you point to a source?

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