The stats iPhone developers are missing: Sales Conversion and Referral Source

Appsto.re bothers me a lot so far.<p>I say so far, because they seem to offer very little (the screenshots show number of clicks, regions and referrals), but in return, they put their iTunes affiliate link: from what I gather, that get them 5% of all iTunes purchases for that account in the following 4 months (or until another affiliate link is used).<p>Honestly, that's disproportionate. One could get the 5% themselves and have the same level of analytics just by setting up Google Analytics and a LinkShare program. An hour's worth of work.<p>Sure, they provide a free service and deserve to be paid for it. I just have the feeling that their reasoning went the other way: "let's put our affiliate link everywhere. Now how do we do that?". The fact that their offering is very light for now seems to indicate that I'm right about that.

You can also roll your own with linkshare affiliate program and a URL shortener. These guys need to provide (emphasize if the already provide it) some better analytic tools.<p>Most traffic still comes from within the app store, however, and these users are non-traceable as far as I know.

How is this different than using bit.ly?

Has anyone tried to setup an affiliate program with Apple directly. That way, developers can get the 5% commission themselves and also track sales conversions (without going through a third party that pockets the 5% commission)

If I could just find out about this about an hour earlier :D (Shameless plug: <a href="http://appsto.re/splitmyballs" rel="nofollow">http://appsto.re/splitmyballs</a>)