The app marketing stack, honestly

Written by people who sell one part of this, about which parts you should and should not pay for.

6 August 2026 · PAD team

Requires a paid product

• Deferred deep linking, opening a specific screen after install: needs an SDK, no way around it
• In-app event attribution at scale: same
• Serious creative production, if you run volume

Free and often skipped

• App Store campaign tokens: deterministic campaign attribution for nothing
• Google Play install referrer: the same on Android, better
• SKAdNetwork conversion values: coarse but free and consent-independent
• Manual link testing from inside social apps: ten minutes, finds the largest leak most accounts have

Cheap and worth it

Link routing that survives in-app browsers, which is the part we sell. Nine dollars a month for the paid tier, free for three apps, and it addresses a loss that is usually larger than anything else on this list.

We would say that, so check the claim rather than taking it: paste your link into the checker and see what happens.

Frequently bought without needing it

• Full attribution platforms for apps doing modest volume, where campaign tokens would do
• Link-in-bio services for accounts with a single destination
• Shorteners, for anything other than print and spoken addresses

The order to build it

Working links first, because everything else is measured through them. Then free attribution. Then paid attribution when volume justifies it. Then everything else.

Most teams do this in reverse, buying attribution before confirming that taps arrive, which produces precise measurement of a broken funnel.