Google now lets iOS app promoters measure downloads from in-app ads

Google today announced an interesting change for developers who inject in-app ads via the search company’s AdWords platform. Apps that show Google’s display ads can now track downloads that occur when a user hits the in-app ad promoting a third-part iOS app. This feature was previously available to Android customers only. This requires a minor work on part of developers who are required to integrate an SDK into their warez, in addition to a small snippet of code.

The snippet is available in the AdWords interface on the wen, in the same place where advertisers have been able to codelessly track Android downloads. In comparison, the same solution on Android only needs a new conversion in a developer’s AdWords account…

According to a post over at Google’s official Inside AdSense blog, iOS conversion tracking allows marketers to “better understand which campaigns are most effective at driving app downloads”. Tracking URLs from third-parties are not supported at this time.

Google also notes in a support document that iOS conversion tracking doesn’t support in-app ads which yank users directly into the App Store. A workaround solution involves pointing the ad to an itunes.apple.com URL, which takes user to an iTunes Preview on the web.

Your conversion rate, cost-per-conversion, and value-to-click ratio data are adjusted to reflect only those clicks from which we can track conversions. Some users and publisher apps choose not to use conversion tracking. So, not all conversions resulting from your AdWords ads can be reported.

iOS conversion tracking uses both the new iOS 6 advertising identifier (IDFA) and the iOS 5 universal device identifier (UDID), per rules laid out in the iOS developer program license agreement.

“Once most users and apps transition to iOS 6, we plan to phase out usage of UDID”, Google notes.

Google’s AdWords advertising platform isn’t as popular an advertising solution on the iOS platform compared to Android, where developers can choose to inject AdSense ads inside their apps for their share of mobile advertising revenue.