Category: xcode
How to track Conversions for iOS App Sales
For the last version of Tessitura Pro 1.9.5, I created a short promo video and started a in-stream video campaign in adwords.
The most important aspect of a campaign is to be able to track conversions (how many views of the video turn into actual installations of the app)
Here are the steps I followed to make this happen.
- Create and Upload the video to YouTube
- Create a new Video campaign in google adwords
Make sure you choose Mobile app installs and find your app using the search in the Your mobile app drop down search boxOnce you’ve selected your app, new options will appear.
Choose the Bidding, etc…
I chose a specific Advanced mobile and tablet options since I want the potential viewers of my promo video to buy the app directly from within the video (actually it will take them to the App Store but on the same device they are viewing the video)Then name your Ad group name for the campaign (you could have many different promo videos or different setting for the same video in your campaign, each of those would be an Ad group which is linked to one video).
And search for your video on YouTube.
Once you’ve selected your video you will have more options to choose from.
I am using an In-stream ad which will appear at the beginning of some other video, but you may choose a Video discovery ad type that will appear as a recommended video on some part of the screen depending on the device.You will also need to name this specific ad in the Ad name box (since you might want to have the same video showing as a different kind of ad for example)
Then you will be shown the following page:
- Click on the Conversions tool link
- Find and click on the name of the conversion you’ve just created (in my case is Tessitura Installation, you may rename it as well)
- On the next page choose how you will setup up conversion tracking.
I chose Put tacking code into the app
- Download the Google Conversion Tracking SDK
- Open your project in XCode, unzip the downloaded file and drag the entire folder into your project. Make sure you have the Add to target selected
- The SDK library references the iOS
AdSupport
development framework which may not already be part of your project. To add this framework, open the Link Binary With Libraries dropdown under the Build Phases tab. Add the framework from the iOS SDK using the + button.
- Also, you need to add
-ObjC
to the Other Linker Flags of your application target’s build setting:- In Xcode’s project navigator, press the blue top-level project icon.
- Click on your target, then the Build Settings tab.
- Under Linking > Other Linker Flags, add
-ObjC
to both Debug and Release.
- Finally you need to add the [ACTConversionReporter…] code snippet to your AppDelegate.m in the didFinishLaunchingWithOptions
- Now when you run your project you should get a successful ping to Google in your projects console’s window
- If you go back to the conversions pages in Google Adwords you will eventually see a change in the Tracking Status column saying Recording Conversions (google says it take a couple of days, it work sooner for me)
- It is important that you add a Call-to-action overlay on your promo video.
So go to your video edit page on your YouTube account and choose the Call-to-action overlay tab. Add a headline, a display URL (I used my website mDecks.com), a destination URL (use the complete iTunes Store url for your app without the https:// itunes.apple.com/us/app/tessitura-pro/id1144493337?ls=1&mt=8 ) and your app’s icon as a 74×74 image
That’s all. Now I am able to track every single Tessitura Pro installation from the promo video I’ve created as a conversion.
iTunes Connect error -22421 solved!
Submitting and app to iTunes Connect without errors is not as simple as it should be, although the review process is now so much faster than it used to be. Back in 2015 app reviews would take almost a week before you knew if the app had been rejected or not. These days (and I am talking November 2016) app reviews take only one day before they are live on the App Store.
Today I tried uploading a new version of Tessitura Pro 1.9.4 to iTunes Connect from within XCode 8.1 and I got an error with code -22421
Searching on the internet I couldn’t find any case that applied to mine. Apparently -22421 is returned as an error code for several different reasons.
Here’s the problem I had: On my previous (most recent) version of Tessitura, I selected 9.3 as the iOS version in Deployment Target. But for some reason after opening the project inĀ XCode 8.1 my deployment target had changed to 8.4
I am guessing you can’t downgrade the deployment target on an app (although I don’t this for a fact). I changed it back to 9.3 and the new Tessitura built uploaded without any problems
In this new version I am adding a google adwords conversion tracking snippet to track installs on the app and I thought that was the problem. I still don’t know whether the tracking code will be accepted in the review process, but I will write a new post with my findings once it’s worked.
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