The stats iPhone developers are missing: Sales Conversion and Referral Source | Hacker News Reader

The stats iPhone developers are missing: Sales Conversion and Referral Source

blog.appsto.re

19 pointsprbuckley21 comments

How many people in the hackernews community would find this tool useful?

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.

I don't see anything wrong with this business. If somebody can't be bothered with linkshare this is a useful service. Linkshare is actually a bit of pain to use.

I agree that they could develop a bit ricer presentation, but maybe they practice the minimal-viable-product and plan to iterate. :-)

I totally agree that providing good analytics tools vs. their affiliate link is not a bad business. If they make some people's life easier, that's just fine.

Really what bothers me is the lack of balance between their offer and what they get from it.

So, sure, maybe they start at the very minimal product and will improve on it. Until then, I'll be wary.

They are providing you a service and 5% of app sales is nothing given that there are 10 more websites doing very similar stuff.

To be clear, the 5% are actually coming out of Apple's pocket, not the developer's. Which, I suppose, is an argument for the service. Also, (though I'm not completely sure) it's 5% of anything bought from the store, not just said app, until that affiliate token is overwritten by another one. So that could potentially be a big chunk of commissions.

Overall, I'm thinking "why not? it's not hurting anybody", but I just feel like they're the agent that screws their clients on how much they're really getting paid. (or to be more Apple-centric: Jobs only giving a small chunk of what Atari paid him to Woz for Woz's work)

However, I don't follow you with "there are 10 more websites doing very similar stuff". It's not a justification to me.

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.

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.

Hi Timothee, We need to use the affiliate link to provide sales conversion tracking. That is only way you can get transparency into iTunes. I understand your knee jerk reaction but honestly we are just trying to make a useful tool for the development community.

If you really want to do the hard work of getting all the analytics we provide setup your self here is a blog post for you...

http://shanecrawford.org/2009/119/tracking-appstore-conversi...

We have a dedicated group that is going to be adding a bunch more cool features to the appsto.re service. Give us a shot we are here to make the service a valuable tool.

Hi prbuckley (and that goes for ohad as well), thanks for your reply and my apologies if my comments sounded undeservedly critical.

I'm glad to hear that you will be iterating over your product. I suppose I underestimate the inefficiencies around using LinkShare.

But I hope you'll be able to use my comments as a way to improve at least your messaging. At it is now, it's really as if bit.ly were adding their Amazon code every time they were shortening an Amazon link. To some people, that would make them a great business. To me, it's just shady.

Thanks Timothee,

This may just be a case of wording, we started as a bit.ly for iPhone apps, and moved into the services for iPhone developers. If bit.ly would offer a premium service where you use a subset of their URLs (say, bit.ly/app_XXX) and they put in affiliate codes so that they can track your sales data and give it back to you, people's reaction would be 'sweet, more features from bit.ly'.

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.

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

How is this different than using bit.ly?

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.

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.

No, that's not possible without tons of code to generate codes, cross reference, generate reports. appsto.re is a turn-key service, doing it by yourself is much more work than you would expect, and isn't worth it to a single or even a small group of developers.

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...

Thanks for commenting.

And on top of that:

  - Sign up for your own affiliate account
  - Link to your apps with that affiliate link
  - ???
  - Profit!

If a commission of 1.5 cents for a 99cent app is a profit channel for you, I recommend pan-handling :-)

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)

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

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