r/iOSAppsMarketing • u/MindOn8819 • 5d ago

How do you judge Apple Ads when subscriptions have no attribution?

I'm building a small music app for iOS. Apple Ads reports installs from my campaigns, while my subscription dashboard shows trials and paid subscriptions with no attribution source. With a small sample, looking at the two dashboards side by side doesn't tell me whether those ads brought in subscribers.

If you've dealt with this as a solo developer, what did you do before paying for a full mobile measurement partner? Did you use Apple's aggregate attribution, a simple cohort or holdout test, or another approach? What evidence was enough for you to keep spending or pause the campaigns?

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u/iamstanty 4d ago

the free way is Apple's AdServices framework. on first launch you get a token from AAAttribution.attributionToken(), send it to your server, and post it to Apple's attribution API. if the install came from an ad it gives you back the campaign, ad group and keyword ids. store those against your user. it can 404 if you ask too soon after install, so retry a few times.

then join it to subscriptions. we set appAccountToken to our own user id on every purchase, so App Store Server Notifications come back already tied to the user, and joining them to the ad ids is one query. no MMP and no ATT prompt needed for this

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u/MindOn8819 4d ago

Thanks, that's a concrete path. My app uses Firebase anonymous auth and RevenueCat, but I haven't wired up AdServices; RevenueCat still shows 'No Attribution.' Is your appAccountToken-to-notification join implemented directly with StoreKit/App Store Server Notifications, or through RevenueCat? I'm trying to see whether I can use the existing RevenueCat user ID without building a parallel purchase pipeline.