I paid three micro-influencers to promote my app last month. £150 each. One of them drove 40 purchases. One drove two. One drove zero. If I hadn't tracked per-influencer, I'd have assumed they all did roughly the same and kept paying all three.
That's the basic case for per-influencer attribution. You probably already know you should be doing it. The question is how, without bolting on some enterprise analytics platform that costs more than the influencers themselves.
The spreadsheet approach (and why it breaks)
Most indie developers start with a spreadsheet. You note down which influencer posted when, then check your download numbers the next day and try to work out who drove what.
This falls apart quickly. Two influencers post on the same day. A video goes viral three days later. Someone's audience is in a different timezone and the spike shows up a day after you expected. You end up guessing, which defeats the point.
Downloads also aren't the metric you actually care about. You want purchases. Someone can drive 500 downloads with zero conversions, and another can drive 30 downloads where half of them buy. The spreadsheet approach can't distinguish between these two.
What you actually need
The setup is straightforward:
- Each influencer gets their own link
- When someone taps that link and installs your app, the install is attributed to that influencer
- When that person later makes a purchase, the purchase is attributed too
That last step is where most solutions fall over. Plenty of tools can track clicks and installs. Tracking the purchase that happens days later inside the app, then connecting it back to the original link tap, is harder.
Setting this up with LinkOwl
LinkOwl was built for exactly this. Here's the workflow:
Create a link for each influencer. Log into LinkOwl, create a tracked link, give it a name like "sarah-tiktok-jan" or whatever makes sense to you. You get a unique URL.
Send the link to the influencer. They put it in their bio, story link, or wherever they're driving traffic from. Each influencer uses only their link.
LinkOwl tracks the chain. When someone taps Sarah's link, gets redirected to your App Store page, installs the app, and eventually makes a purchase, that purchase shows up in your LinkOwl dashboard attributed to Sarah's link.
The purchase tracking works through a RevenueCat webhook (or Superwall, if that's what you use). When a purchase happens in your app, RevenueCat pings LinkOwl with the transaction details. LinkOwl matches it back to the original click using the attribution it stored at install time.
You don't need to build any of this logic yourself. Add the LinkOwl SDK to your app, set up the webhook, and the pipeline handles the rest.
What the data actually tells you
Once you've got a few influencers running with tracked links, you start seeing things like:
Cost per purchase, per influencer. If you paid Sarah £150 and she drove 40 purchases at £2.49 each, that's £3.75 per purchase against ~£100 in revenue (before Apple's cut). If you paid Mike £150 and he drove 2 purchases, that's £75 per purchase. The numbers make the decision for you.
Audience quality differences. Some influencers have audiences that download and never open the app again. Others have audiences that buy within the first session. You can only see this with purchase-level attribution.
Which platforms convert. An influencer might be on TikTok and Instagram. Give them separate links for each platform. You might find their TikTok audience browses but their Instagram audience buys.
Time-to-purchase patterns. Some influencer audiences buy immediately. Others take a week. Knowing this helps you plan when to run promotions around influencer posts.
The pricing question
Enterprise attribution tools like AppsFlyer or Adjust charge monthly fees that start in the hundreds. That makes sense if you're running campaigns across dozens of influencers and spending thousands a month.
If you're an indie developer testing two or three influencers at a time, those tools are absurd. You'd spend more on attribution than on the influencers.
LinkOwl charges 5p per attributed purchase. No monthly fee. No minimum. If an influencer drives zero purchases, you pay nothing. If they drive 100, you pay £5. The cost scales with your actual revenue, not with some arbitrary monthly tier.
Getting started
The setup takes about 10 minutes:
- Sign up at linkowl.app and register your app
- Add the LinkOwl SDK to your project (Swift, React Native, or via your preferred build tool)
- Connect RevenueCat or Superwall via webhook
- Create a tracked link for each influencer
- Send them their links
From there, every purchase that traces back to an influencer link shows up in your dashboard. You'll know within a week which influencers are worth re-booking and which aren't.
The hardest part of influencer marketing isn't finding creators. It's knowing which ones actually move the needle. Per-influencer attribution turns that from a guess into a number.