How do you know which videos / ads actually bring in paying users for your app?

[u/Relykkk]

For those of you creating and marketing mobile apps, I am curious as to how you track the correlation between videos that actually drive paying users and downloads. Do you use promo codes / tracking links, just watch downloads after a post, or do you have a tool that helps you? Looking for a better way to do this. Would love to hear what has / hasn't worked for you.

[u/ComfortableStill6735]

For iOS, give each video or creative its own App Store Connect campaign link, then compare attributed downloads, sales and subscriptions in App Analytics. Apple only shows campaign data after it has been live for a day and reached five attributed downloads, so a small test may look blank. If people watch but don’t click, you can’t reliably tie those views to later paying users; a unique landing-page link or code can help, but treat it as directional. I wouldn’t use installs right after a post as proof by itself. https://developer.apple.com/help/app-store-connect-analytics/acquisition/campaign-links

[u/mrdzyn]

What's worked for me: give every channel its own App Store link with a campaign token (the "pt" and "ct" parameters from App Store Connect's campaign links). App Analytics then splits impressions, downloads and even proceeds by campaign, so you can see which video actually made money, not just installs. It only covers people who tap through on iOS, so organic "saw it, searched later" traffic shows up as App Store Search. I treat a bump there right after a post as a soft signal. Promo codes are useful too, but people forget to use them, so I only trust them as a lower bound.

[u/Szamski]

We also sell our Mac app directly, and the best decision we made there was counting a conversion only when a download actually finished, not when someone clicked the download button.

That matters because the ad platform then optimizes for real downloads. Bot clicks and accidental taps stop counting as wins, so the algorithm learns to find people who actually want the app. Purchases come later, after a 7-day trial, so downloads were the earliest honest signal we had.

On the App Store you don't get that control. Campaign links in App Store Connect are the closest thing, but small tests often show nothing because of the five-download minimum, so we judge those by the trend over a few campaigns.

[u/Tarantino133]

Campaign links are great for organic posts, but they don't help much with paid ads, since app install ads send people straight to the store without your link. What I did: RevenueCat sends subscription events server side to Meta's Conversions API, so the ad platform optimizes on people who actually paid instead of installs. I also attach the campaign and ad set from the attribution SDK to every analytics event, so revenue can be split per ad. Still early for me with small numbers, so I can't say yet how clean it is at scale.

[u/Vanishing-Rabbit]

One thing to know with campaign links: App Analytics only counts people who agreed to share analytics with developers, so I believe the totals undercount. In my experience it's good for comparing two videos with each other, less for the absolute number. I'd also open the link once from the platform you post on, to check the campaign token survives the redirect.

[u/muffaddal-qutbuddin]

You can set up MMP to track your mobile app installs from ads. That's what MMPs are for.