Mobile Advertising: What are some ways to track web campaigns to an app download in iOS?

There's no single right answer for tracking app downloads on iOS.  There are three basic methods in common use today, and some have variants. Support for these technologies varies by ad network and publisher. There are tradeoffs with each - e.g., some provide more accurate tracking results than others. Some of these are also specific to in-app promotion. A quick rundown on the methods: ID-based technologies. This includes Apple's new Advertising Identifier, the UDID (which is being phased out by Apple),  MAC addresses, and some additional variants. Digital fingerprinting, which uses statistical estimation and sampling, so there is an error rate which varies from one tracker to the next. HTML5 cookie tracking, which provides accurate tracking but requires a user redirect. If you want to get the the best reach, you'd want to support all of the methods. We (Fiksu) have a white paper,  "How Mobile Ad Tracking Affects App Marketing Results," which goes into the tradeoffs in detail.  You can access it at: http://www.fiksu.com/resources

The only two ways are device fingerprinting (highly unreliable) and cookies (reliable specifically for mobile browsers that allow cookies).  However, Apple is now denying iPhone apps that use cookie tracking:  http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/25/apple-rejecting-apps-using-cookie-tracking-methods-signaling-push-to-its-own-ad-identifier-technology-is-now-underway/

Check out TapStream. They suggest a turnkey solution that allows you to identify users that funnel in as web>app traffic using their SDK. Check them out here: http://www.tapstream.com

AppsFlyer is leading mobile campaign measurement since 2011. We do that at scale measuring millions of app installs every day. We track any source, app or web. Full disclosure: I'm the CEO at AppsFlyer. http://www.appsflyer.com

We support this at Jumptap.  I am not going to go into how we do it but we can handle this on a good percentage of our traffic.  We also support multiple conversion events across the app/web divide to give you a further feel for the lifetime value of a user.

There are a number of solutions that offer app conversion tracking now on the market. They all require an SDK to be inserted into your app. You then use special links at click time to match up the download to the traffic source. Some (Like http://www.tapsense.com) offer a full suite of tracking tools that will manage paid, social, email, push notifications and mobile web. There are free solutions, but they generally don't cover as many use cases as you described. Most people start by building something simple internally and then migrating to full-service paid solution like ours, as their business grows. Good luck, Gregory Kennedy VP of Marketing http://www.tapsense.com/

If you're exluding in-app traffic (i.e. using Google's solution - http://techcrunch.com/2012/10/24/google-adwords-can-now-track-ios-app-downloads-in-addition-to-android/) then, by definition, no tracking system can be 100% perfect. With that said, here are the best  tools I've seen that try "fingerprint" the user and make a reasonable guess at matching web activity to download: 1. http://yoz.io/. 2. http://www.appsflyer.com/ 3. http://www.distimo.com/ I've ordered them base on my experience (Yozio being best). Again, these can only give you good guesses as to which traffic lead to which download - but I found them to be good and getting better. And given that the alternative is having no data, I'd use one for any app I was promoting!

The only way to sensibly track mobile app downloads is to use an independent 3rd party tracking provider. If you are not able to utilise device ID then accuracy will be reduced. If people are seeing your adverts on a PC & not a mobile device, then it will be even more difficult to track the download - unless you can correlate their PC with their mobile device. There are two ways of doing this: 1.) Companies that utilise a cross-platform login, 2.) Cross-platform fingerprinting, correlating IP address, mac address, and location to create statistical matches (pretty inaccurate!)

You likely know Kochava, we are a leading Attribution Analytics and Optimization platform.  What you may not know is we measure the most successful growth apps in the industry.Our platform let's marketers visualize, precisely, which sources deliver the most valuable users (*engagements, registrations, purchases) - with automated campaign optimization tech integrated in the same stack.Kochava http://www.kochavasupport.com/server-to-server-integration/identitylink-setup enables you to stitch audiences together across devices through both deterministic and probabilistic mechanisms.see the http://theKochavaDifference.com for more informationwe are the ONLY MMP with Multi-Touch Attribution technology in production so you can assign fractional attribution along the various touchpoints along the user journey including web and app inventory on both impressions and clicks.  You can configure everything point and click in the UI and prioritize completed views and positional weighting to extract maximum value from your ad buys.see why https://www.kochava.com/kochava-difference/#matrix