Web2App · Published 2024-08-28 · 1 min read
What is Web2App?
Web2App is a way of setting up Google Ads campaigns for iOS apps. The key difference from a standard app campaign is the very first step: you choose Website traffic instead of App.
Why bother
The short answer is: to earn more. The longer answer is below.
Upsides
- A separate market. Buying web traffic gets you off the scorched earth of the app advertising auction.
- Control over targeting. You pick the keywords you want to bid on yourself.
- Attribution that actually works. Because of privacy restrictions, iOS does not tell you which ad campaign a user came from. Web2App has mechanisms that work around that limitation.
Downsides
- The integration is technically hard.
- There is no documentation for it.
Web traffic it is. So what goes in the final URL?
There are two approaches.
- A link to a landing page. Say you have an Android app, an iOS app, a desktop app and a web version, and all of them solve school homework problems. Every time somebody searches for "solve a physics problem", you show them a landing page with all four options.
- A link straight to the App Store listing. Here you only offer iOS.
Why Google Ads and not Facebook
Traffic on Facebook is advertising inside the Instagram and Facebook apps. Going through Facebook does not open up any genuinely new traffic pool.
Why iOS and not Android
On Android there is no attribution problem in the first place: clicks and conversions are counted by the ad network itself. This channel is about the technical difficulty of the integration, which is why I write about iOS.