Before you buy more traffic

None of this is about creative or targeting. It is about whether the traffic you are about to buy can reach the thing you are selling.

6 August 2026 · PAD team

1. Tap your own link from inside the app

Not Safari. Post it to a story only you can see, tap it from your feed on a real iPhone, wait three seconds. A blank page means every dollar of the coming campaign buys the same blank page.

2. Check which objective you are running

App install campaigns open the store natively and are safe. Traffic and conversion campaigns route through the in-app browser. If you are on the second and have not fixed the last link, stop here.

3. Count the hops

Every redirect between the ad and the store is a chance to lose campaign parameters. More than two deserves a look, and five is common in accounts that have been running for years.

4. Confirm the tokens are at the end

ct and pt on the final App Store URL, referrer on Play. Attached earlier, they may not survive. Verify in App Store Connect the day after the first traffic, not by reading your own setup.

5. Decide what you will measure

If the only number you will look at afterwards is clicks, you will not learn whether the campaign worked. Decide now how you will know that taps arrived, because retrofitting that after a campaign is impossible.

The cost of skipping this

On our measured mix, 96.4% of taps arriving from social apps were iOS, where a plain store link opens nothing. Ten minutes against that share of a budget is the best rate of return available in app marketing.