A while ago I ran into 2 blog posts from Shane Crawford about how to get a LinkShare affiliate Id so you can get an additional 5% from every sale and do some tracking conversions. You can find his posts here and here. Part 3 is still missing in action but you’ll do fine!

While I enjoy the extra money this provides me with, I’m more concerned about learning about how advertisement campaigns are performing so that’s why I’m redirecting visitors to my website before sending them to the App Store.

When you apply for an iTunes LinkShare affiliate ID, you’re likely to get rejected at first, especially if your website is outside the US. If that happens to you, just contact LinkShare to let them know that you intend to use your affiliate ID for the US iTunes Store only and you should get approved.

Now that you have your affiliate ID and have created your products links, it’s time to put them to good use. I suggest that you create a link on your website (ex: http://edovia.com/appstoreredirect…) to which you pass needed parameters. In my case, I pass the appId and the u1 parameter you’ve read about in Shane’s posts.

Try that link on both your iPhone and your Mac and see how it behaves in both cases:

http://edovia.com/appstoreredirect/appId=6&u1=blog

This allows me to log the redirection and know where it comes from. It also allows me to control how to present the redirection to the user. I treat the iPhone traffic differently since I don’t want the user to have to go through yet another webpage before hitting the App Store.

When a redirect occurs from say a desktop, I present the potential user with a “Thank You” page, that replaces the default redirect page you normally get when Safari jumps to iTunes.app:

The redirection occurs in a 1×1 iframe. I got this method from a Karelia’s blog post. I highly recommend subscribing to their feed about indie marketing. Really useful information!

Mobile Safari won’t handle the iframe tag so this method won’t work on an Apple mobile device. That’s why we have to check the user agent and make sure our redirection will open App Store.app directly.

So I’ve added some PHP detection code to my redirect page to handle this:

<?php
	// Log redirect into database
	...
	...

	$serverAnswer = $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'];

	// Fetched LinkShare link associated with product and u1 parameter
	$url = $product_item["appstore_link"].$dResponse["linkshare"]; 

	if (ereg("Mobile", $serverAnswer)) {
		// Simply redirect to the App Store through LinkShare.
		// This will gracefully launch App Store.app
		header('Location: '.$url);
	}
	else {
		// Present the redirect "Thank you" page that
		// contains that iframe I've told you about.
		$dResponse['views']['header'] =
			array('url'=>'./app/pages/header_front.php');
		$dResponse['views']['content'] =
			array('url'=>'./app/pages/appstoreredirect.php');
		$dResponse['views']['footer'] =
			array('url'=>'./app/pages/footer.php');
	}
	exit;
?>

That’s it! I’m sure I’ve probably missed a few conversions along the way and that my method could probably better but I don’t really care that much for conversions anyway, as long as I can see trends and confirm that advertisement campaigns are successful. I also like the idea that I can control the redirection and change it along the way if necessary.