Apr 21
2015

Use the iTunes Affiliate Program. It’s Worth it.

If you are an app developer and not using the iTunes Affiliate Program, you need to drop everything and sign up. Period.

Using affiliate links is not going to buy you a new Ferrari, or send your kids to college, but as an indie it’s an easy to use additional income stream that you should not overlook.

You may think affiliate links are somehow sleazy. Sometimes they are, but that is not true with the iTunes affiliate program. There are no weird URLs and redirects. To use the affiliate program links, you simply add an additional URL query parameter (&at=YOUR_AFFLIATE_TOKEN) to the normal iTunes links to any app, movie, music, or anything else on the iTunes/App Stores. Including your own apps.

I have a somewhat unique situation with my own apps, because a number of them specialize in integration with other apps, and I run a directory of actions which profiles integrations and uses affiliate links, but those links make up only a small portion of my affiliate income. Most of it is derived from direct links from my website to the App Store. My iTunes affliate program numbers for the last calendar year are as follows:

The commissions are 7% on sales that result from your affliate traffic. In the case where a customer clicks on your link, to your app, from your website, and buys your app, that effectively means you have reduced Apple’s cut from 30% to 23%.

The affliate links carry over to other purchases made by the user that followed your link as well. If they browse more and decide to buy a competing product, you also win.

If your app is free, and they follow your link, then buy something totally different within 24 hours, you win.

In addition to the commission revenue, you can gather useful analytics data from affiliate links if you include a campaign parameter (&ct=arbitrary_campaign_name) in your affiliate links. You can set this parameter to any value, and alter it when you use the links it different places. The affiliate portal breaks down your clicks/revenue/conversion data by these campaigns, so if you vary them for links from in your apps, from your website, from tweets, etc., you can get a good idea what links are most successful in converting customers.

This post is not intended to teach you how to use the affliate program detail, simply to encourage you to take advantage of this program which has no discernable downsides. If you are interested, here are some next steps:

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Awkward Hare is a blog by Greg Pierce. I run a company called Agile Tortoise.