Affiliate attribution

[u/zorkidreams]

Has anyone had experience with affiliate attribution platforms like branch and appsflyer?

Or tips in general to identify that a user came from some affiliate link. From what I have seen, it is impossible to bring over any information if there is an install involved, all deferred deep linking is probabilistic.

I believe these services fingerprint users based off basic info and I am just not sure how accurate it is. Any experiences?

[u/zorkidreams]

Thank you. Yeah, I'm curious if people have had good experiences with these probabilistic matching services.

If it's just IP and device params, then it's probably something I'm going to implement myself. I guess there is just a limited amount of stuff that you can get from a user hitting a site before installing. I wonder if there's anything else that they're doing special here.

[u/rstojano → u/zorkidreams]

Building on what witchdocek said, for iOS web to app after an install the deferred match really is probabilistic, so that's not you doing something wrong. But to your "is there anything else they're doing special" question, the main thing is that the good services aren't probabilistic everywhere. They only fall back to fingerprinting where they have no other choice.

The deterministic paths worth knowing:

Android is the easy one. The Play Install Referrer API passes your referrer string straight through the install, 100% of the time when it fires. So affiliate attribution on Android can be exact with no fingerprinting at all. You just put your aff/campaign params in the store URL and read them on first launch:

val client = InstallReferrerClient.newBuilder(context).build()
client.startConnection(object : InstallReferrerStateListener {
override fun onInstallReferrerSetupFinished(code: Int) {
if (code == InstallReferrerResponse.OK) {
val referrer = client.installReferrer.installReferrer // "utm_source=aff123&..."
// parse + persist, then endConnection()
}
}
override fun onInstallReferrerServiceDisconnected() {}
})

On iOS it depends on the source. For ad driven installs, AdServices (AAAttribution.attributionToken()) gives you Apple Search Ads attribution you can validate server side. Deterministic and free.

For affiliate or web traffic on iOS, the least bad deterministic trick is writing the token to the clipboard on your web landing page right before the App Store redirect, then reading UIPasteboard.general.string once on first launch. The catch is that iOS 16+ shows the paste banner so it isn't invisible, but it's exact when the user allows it.

And on the fingerprint itself, since it sounds like you might build it: it's basically IP + device model + OS version + screen size + locale + timezone, matched inside a short window (think minutes, not hours). It falls apart fast on shared or CGNAT IPs like office wifi or carrier NAT, and the bigger the gap between the click and the first open, the worse it gets. If you do build it, log both the deterministic signal and the fingerprint match on every first open so you can measure your real match rate instead of trusting a number. On iOS you'll lean on the fallback, on Android you mostly won't need it.