I am one of the founders behind appsto.re. The analytics appsto.re is providing focuses on sales conversions per click for iPhone apps. Bit.ly does not do this. Bit.ly will give you referral sources but does not provide any transparency into what happens when someone lands on your iTunes app page, appsto.re analytics can tell you if a click actually converted into a sale.
OK but to clarify, a developer could just create a linkshare URL and then drop those links into bit.ly to track clicks and then conversions on those clicks?
You say you track conversions by source but I assume you have to have 1 URL per source correct? If this is the case you are no different than what I suggest above but you take a 5% cut instead of the developer getting it.
You are correct, a developer could get a linkshare url and drop it into bit.ly. Then they would have to do a lot more work to get the bit.ly click data to overlap with the linkshare data. We do some other statistcal analysis to be sure we aren't counting other app sales in your data. There is actually a substantial amount of work behind getting this to all work smoothly.
We see appsto.re as being a turn key no headache solution. We do the work of making sure things don't break, adding new analytics tools and handling all the details that it doesn't make sense for a single developer to worry about.
Shane Crawford has a great two part blog post if you really want to implement this yourself ...
No, that's not possible without tons of code to generate codes, cross reference, generate reports. appsto.re is a turn-key service, doing it by yourself is much more work than you would expect, and isn't worth it to a single or even a small group of developers.
"Dear America: you can’t have an economy based on narcissism, good intentions, marketing, catering to rich bored people, really excellent webpages, and selling underpants on the internet."
Quite a statement coming from someone working on "problems in quantitative finance." Not sure which adds less value, high frequency trading or (insert any activity on earth here).
Interesting data...to your point about our piracy rates being high at 85% - I agree but think it is only a symptom of our App being new and expect it to trend toward 50% or less in a few months.
Also important to note is that calculated the piracy rate as the difference between iTunes sales and Pinch media uniques. I have found that Pinch Media's data is less conclusive than it used to be so I wasn't using their metrics for either cracked or jailbroken phones.
As for the pirates try before they buy excuse, I agree that this is probably not the case. I think it is a churn game (similar to music) for most pirates - they try hundreds of apps for very little time and stick with only the very few that they like.
As for your piracy block - I tried this once and decided better to let them have a lite version of the app over blocking them entirely. Not sure the point of angering the most vocal, early adopters on the web. Check out a post I wrote dealing with this: http://www.icombatgame.com/2009/05/22/on-the-web-every-users...
The point is precisely that - what does the rest of the app matter if 60% of your users are deleting it in frustration after the first screen?
Also - the web portal requiring maiden name and phone number is a bit extreme. It is as if DD's goal of getting user data outweighed their desire to make the app easy to load and use.
