A TikTok video about my app hit 40,000 views on a Thursday. The next morning I had 300 new downloads. Over the following week, about 15 purchases came in. Good news. Except I'd posted three videos that week, and I had no way of knowing which one did the work.

That's TikTok's attribution problem in a nutshell. The platform is absurdly good at distributing content. It's terrible at telling you what happened after someone left the app.

Why TikTok attribution is harder than other platforms

TikTok gives you views, likes, comments, shares, and profile visits. What it doesn't give you is purchase data. There's no built-in way to say "this video drove 15 sales worth £37."

TikTok Ads Manager has some conversion tracking, but that requires running paid campaigns and installing their pixel or SDK. If you're doing organic content (which is where most indie developers start), TikTok gives you nothing beyond engagement metrics.

The other problem is the bio link bottleneck. TikTok allows one clickable link in your bio. You can't put links in video captions. So every video you post funnels through the same bio URL. Post five videos in a week and they all point to the same link. Good luck figuring out which one converted.

Some creators get around this by saying "link in bio" in their video and then swapping the bio link for each new post. That works if you only post once a week and your audience taps immediately. In practice, people save videos and come back later, by which point you've already changed the link.

The fix: one tracked link per video

The approach that actually works is simple. Give each video its own tracked link. Not in the TikTok caption (you can't), but in the places people actually tap.

Here's what that looks like with LinkOwl:

You create a tracked link for each video or campaign
You use that link in your bio when the video goes live
When someone taps through and eventually purchases in your app, that purchase gets attributed back to the specific link

If you're posting daily, you rotate the bio link each day. If you're posting a few times a week, each video gets its own link that stays active while that video is getting views.

Setting it up

Create your account and add your app

Connect purchase tracking

LinkOwl needs to know when a purchase happens. If you're using RevenueCat (most indie iOS developers are), you connect it with a webhook. Go to your RevenueCat dashboard, add LinkOwl's webhook URL from your settings page, and you're done. Every purchase event gets sent to LinkOwl automatically.

If you're using StoreKit directly, the Swift SDK handles it. You initialise with your API key and call LinkOwl.shared.trackPurchase(amount:currency:) after a successful transaction. About 10 lines of code total.

Create a link for your next video

In the LinkOwl dashboard, create a new link. Name it something you'll recognise later, like "TikTok - teeth brushing hack video - March 12". Set the destination to your App Store listing. Copy the short URL.

Update your TikTok bio

Paste the link into your TikTok bio before the video goes live. When you post your next video, create a new link and swap it out.

Check the results

After a few days, open your dashboard. You'll see visits, installs, and purchases per link. Now you know which video actually drove revenue.

What you learn when you do this

The first thing most people discover is that their best-performing videos and their highest-converting videos are different things.

A funny clip might get 100,000 views and 2 purchases. A boring walkthrough showing exactly how the app solves a specific problem might get 8,000 views and 12 purchases. If you're optimising for views, you'd make more funny clips. If you're optimising for revenue, you'd make more walkthroughs. Those are very different strategies and you can't choose between them without attribution data.

I also found that conversion timing matters. Some videos convert fast, with most purchases within 48 hours. Others have a long tail where purchases trickle in over two weeks as the algorithm keeps serving the video to new people. Knowing this changes how you think about your posting schedule. A slow-burn video with steady conversions might be worth more than a viral spike that dies in a day.

The bio link problem and how to deal with it

If you're posting daily, swapping your bio link every day is a bit tedious. Here are two approaches that work:

Option 1: Rotate the link for each new video. Accept that there'll be some attribution bleed. If someone sees Tuesday's video but taps the bio link on Wednesday after you've swapped it, that purchase gets attributed to Wednesday's link. For most people this is accurate enough. The video getting the most views on any given day is usually the one driving the most taps.

Option 2: Use a stable bio link and track campaigns weekly. Create one link per week instead of per video. You lose per-video granularity but you still know which week's content batch performed best. Simpler to manage, and the week-over-week data is still useful for spotting trends.

Pick whichever approach matches your posting frequency. Per-video tracking is better data. Per-week tracking is less admin.

A note on TikTok Shop vs app purchases

If you're selling a physical product through TikTok Shop, TikTok handles that attribution natively. This article is about app purchases, where TikTok has no visibility at all into what happens after someone leaves the platform. That's the gap you need to fill yourself.

What this costs

LinkOwl charges 5p per attributed purchase. No monthly fee, no minimum commitment. If your TikTok videos drive 100 purchases in a month, that's £5 in attribution costs against whatever revenue those purchases generated. If they drive zero purchases, you pay nothing.

For context, AppsFlyer and Adjust start at hundreds of pounds per month regardless of whether you make any sales. For an indie developer doing organic TikTok content, that maths doesn't work.

Getting started

The whole setup takes about 10 minutes. Create an account, connect RevenueCat or add the SDK, and create your first tracked link. Post a video, wait a few days, and see what happens.

If nothing else, you'll stop wondering which of your videos is actually making money. That alone changes how you approach content.

How to Track TikTok Sales for Your App