The link you hand a creator

Everything else in a creator deal is negotiable afterwards. The address is not.

6 August 2026 · PAD team

Why this is different from your own placements

You can edit your bio, your ads and your website whenever you like. A creator's post, story highlight or video description stays as published, and asking twenty people to update a link is a project nobody finishes.

What a raw store link costs you there

Creator audiences tap from inside Instagram and TikTok on iPhones, which is the worst case. A plain apps.apple.com address sends essentially all of them to a blank page, and the creator looks like they shared something broken.

You will not hear about it. Their audience assumes the app is unavailable and scrolls on.

What to hand them instead

• A routing address that survives every in-app browser
• A unique campaign token per creator, so payouts match installs
• Something short enough to type without mistakes
• One instruction: paste exactly this, do not shorten it

That last line matters because creators routinely run links through their own shorteners, which can strip your campaign parameters and adds a hop.

Measuring them fairly

With per-creator tokens, App Store Connect separates installs by source. Combine that with arrival data and you can tell the difference between a creator whose audience does not convert and one whose audience could not reach the store.

A creator with high taps and low installs is not necessarily underperforming. Check whether their audience could arrive at all before renegotiating.

Long tail

Video descriptions and story highlights keep sending traffic for months. A link that works is an asset that keeps paying; a broken one keeps costing quietly, and you have no way to reach back and repair it.