How to quickly build a mobile app affiliate influencer campaign with Appfiliato
In today’s world, it’s getting harder for businesses to keep up with the costs of popular marketing platforms like Meta and Google. Big companies with lots of money for marketing are making it even tougher. Plus, tracking how well ads are doing is trickier now because of something called App Tracking Transparency (ATT). And lately, these big platforms have been having technical problems, like what happened to Meta in March 2024. It shows that relying only on these big platforms for ads might not be so reliable after all.
There’s another great option: Influencer affiliate app marketing. It’s a way to get new users for your app that’s flexible and doesn’t cost much.
Influencer marketing can be very effective, especially if you find small or medium-sized influencers who don’t have a very large audience. These types of influencers are often very motivated to work with apps because they don’t have many other advertisers, and their followers tend to be more engaged since they don’t see many ads from these influencers.
Affiliate app marketing for influencers is attractive because it provides a source of passive income: they can earn commissions not only from each purchase but also from each subscription renewal.
In this article, I’ll explain how to quickly start your first influencer campaign. We’ll need to use three services: RevenueCat for managing subscriptions, Branch for creating deep links, and Appfiliato for handling all aspects of your relationship with influencers (such as sales reports, commissions, clicks, payouts, etc.).
Integration RevenueCat
RevenueCat is a robust and dependable in-app purchase server that simplifies the process of building, analyzing, and expanding your subscriber base. It’s a widely used subscription platform, so there’s a good chance you’re already using it for your app. If not, you can get started in just a few minutes by following this tutorial: https://www.revenuecat.com/docs
Creating Deep Links
Deferred deep links help apps understand the source of an installation. There are several popular deep link services available, such as Branch, Appsflyer, and Firebase Dynamic Links. Many of them offer free plans. In this article, we’ll use Branch because it offers a free plan for up to 10,000 Monthly Active Users (MAU) and is very popular.
Integration Branch
We’ll use Branch Quick Links to generate the links required for your mobile affiliate influencer campaign. For more details, you can check out Branch’s Quick Links documentation at this link: Branch Quick Links documentation.
Integration Appfiliato
Now, we need to register on Appfiliato as an App Owner: Sign up here.
Then, we need to add our app. Please note that in the “Deep Link” field, we must set our Branch Quick Link and add “appfiliato={affiliate_nick}” to the query string. This is how our app will recognize that the user comes from the influencer.
On this page, we can also set the default affiliate commission rates for all new affiliates. You can also set different default commissions for all types of purchases, such as the initial purchase or renewal.
Choose the payment method you want to use for paying influencers. You’ll pay them directly to save on commission fees using Appfiliato reports. Influencers can request payment when their balance reaches $100 or more, and payments must be made within 5 business days after the request is created.
Next, you need to integrate Appfiliato with RevenueCat. To do this, create a new RevenueCat Webhook (go to RevenueCat, Project Settings, Integration, and add the new Webhook), and set the URL from the Webhook on the Appfiliato App page.
The last thing you need to do is receive the “appfiliato” parameter from Branch in your app and set it as a user parameter in RevenueCat. Here’s an example for iOS (AppDelegate, didFinishLaunchingWithOptions):
Branch.getInstance().initSession(launchOptions: launchOptions) { (params, error) in
if let params = params as? [String: AnyObject] {
if params.keys.contains("appfiliato"){
if let appfiliato = params["appfiliato"] as? String {
let attribiutes:[String:String] = ["appfiliato": App.shared.appfiliato]
Purchases.shared.attribution.setAttributes(attribiutes)
}
}
}
}After successfully adding your app, you’ll receive an Invitation Link for Influencers. Share this link with influencers so they can register as Mobile App Affiliates. For instance, here’s the invitation link for my app, Country Days Tracker: Country Days Tracker Invitation Link.
I recommend adding this link to your app’s settings page because you can attract many affiliates from your app users. I did this in my app, and I received numerous new affiliates from current users that I never imagined would be interested, such as tax service companies, yacht companies, people from targeted Facebook groups, travel bloggers, and more.
Congratulations! You’ve just created your first mobile app affiliate campaign.
On the Appfiliato dashboard, you and your affiliates can see the stats for all recent transactions and link clicks.
On the affiliate page, you can set an individual commission rate for each in-app purchase for this affiliate.
All communication with affiliates happens on the Appfiliato chat.
When the affiliate earns $100 or more, they can create a payment request. You can see all payout requests in the Payouts section.
How much does it cost?
Compared to popular marketing platforms where you need to pay upfront, here you only pay if you make a profit. That’s why affiliate app marketing is ideal for apps with a small marketing budget.
Commissions:
- Appfiliato: 4% fee on revenue generated through affiliates.
- RevenueCat: Free up to $2.5K in Monthly Tracked Revenue (MTR), and 1% for $2.5K or more in MTR.
- Branch: Free up to 10,000 Monthly Active Users (MAU); if you have more than 10,000 MAU, then it’s $5 per 1,000 MAU.
If you have any questions, feel free to email us at support@appfiliato.com.
