An Introduction to the iTunes Affiliate Program
· Nik
The 30% that Apple takes out of each App Store sale has long been a bug-bear for developers. It’s the price of admission for the App Store, and allows you to take advantage of services like iCloud - which can be tempting when considering whether an app like Ember should be Mac App Store-only.
However, Apple does offer a way for developers to claw back some of the 30% with the iTunes Affiliate Program. If you’ve visited a website such as TouchArcade, AppShopper, or The Next Web, all these sites are using the affiliate program. It’s a way to earn commission on any iTunes Store purchase - be it music, apps, video or books.
How It Works
The affiliate program pays out 7% of the price of iTunes content and apps. You can also earn commission on In-App Purchases, albeit only for the app you’re linking to - commissions on any other apps’ In-App Purchases aren’t eligible.
Affiliated links to the App Store have a 24 hour “cookie window”, meaning that so long as your affiliate link was the last one on that user’s device any App Store (or indeed iTunes) purchase within that 24-hour window will be linked to your affiliate account and the commission paid to you.
It’s important to remember though that “the last cookie wins”, and that means that you need to be smart, ruthless (and abide by the iTunes Affiliate Program rules). If you’re going to invest the time to use the affiliate program, make sure you go all-in - your website, in-app cross promotion, mailshots, Twitter links and the rest. You also need to make sure you’re set up in a large number of territories.
Get Set Up
There used to be a number of different affiliate networks you needed to sign up for. However Apple is gradually reducing that number (and I’d imagine they’d like it to be just the one in the longer term). Performance Horizon Group (PHG) should be your starting point. There’s a custom, Apple-branded, portal for signup and managing things - and it covers a significant portion of the App Store market with a single registration.
For Europe and Latin America, you’ll need to register with Tradedoubler. The setup is not as slick (and you’ll need to apply for “Europe”, “Latin America” and “Brazil” affiliate membership to cover all the Tradedoubler territories) but it covers some big markets.
With your accounts set up, there’s two pieces of the puzzle still to sort: how to target the correct affiliate link to users, and how to serve up a geographically-accurate App Store link / page for visitors.
We use Georiot to manage this: they’re a startup that detects the location of the user and redirects them to the geographically-appropriate store. This means that each person sees the iTunes Preview page appropriate for their region - the locale-specific pricing, reviews and localised App Store copy and they’re taken to the store with your locale-specific affiliate ID. I can here the engineer in the audience say “well it doesn’t take much to build my own geo-targeting script”, but bear with me.
Georiot makes money as you do (by replacing up to 15% of redirects with their own affiliate information), and if you’ve got different app SKUs for different territories, Georiot is also smart enough to detect that. The only note about Georiot is that their servers cache things pretty heavily, and when launching a new app it can take a while for a direct link to resolve. That said: the team at Georiot are very responsive and able to clear the cache for an app by hand - so a bit of advance notice means you should be all good to go.
A Note on UX
One of my biggest gripes with the affiliate networks has been the redirecting of traffic through a bazillion redirects. However, with the new PHG portal that’s no longer necessary for the territories PHG covers. One link, direct to iTunes, is all it takes (unless you want to change the country identifier in the URL for each territory). Unfortunately, the Tradedoubler-managed territories have a far more convoluted redirect flow:
US Affiliate Link
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ember/id402456742?mt=12&uo=4&at=11l5U5
UK Affiliate Link
http://clkuk.tradedoubler.com/click?p=23708&a=2183255&url=https%3A%2F%2Fitunes.apple.com%2Fgb%2Fapp%2Fember%2Fid402456742%3Fmt%3D12%26uo%3D4%26partnerId%3D2003
With Apple seemingly moving much of their iTunes affiliate infrastructure to the Performance Horizon Group portal however, it may well be that over time services like Georiot aren’t as necessary and all territories can use redirect-free web addresses. The only downside is that, without any geo-switching fanciness, visitors won’t see locale-specific iTunes Previews with appropriate pricing, copy, and reviews.
Wrap-up
The return you’ll see on implementing the iTunes Affiliate Program is dependent on the amount of traffic you send to the App Store. You’ll need to make use of affiliate links in all your mailshots, webpages, social networks and more to make any substantial amount, but there’s no reason not to spend a bit of time setting this up and earning a few cents for every sale you send to iTunes and the App Stores.
In a future post I’ll be exploring how to track campaigns using Apple’s own affiliate tools and more - but for now, I’ll leave you to get started on your own affiliate setup. If you’ve got any questions or tips of your own, I’d love to hear them so get in touch with me on Twitter!