What if you leave it broken

Not everything is worth fixing. Here is what the do-nothing option actually costs, so you can decide properly.

6 August 2026 · PAD team

The case for doing nothing

If your traffic is almost all Android, or almost all from app install campaigns that open the store natively, or you spend very little on social, then this problem is genuinely small for you. Ignoring it is a defensible choice.

Check before deciding: pull the iOS share of your social traffic and the split between install and traffic objectives. If iOS in-app traffic is a small slice, stop reading.

The case against, in numbers

For everyone else, the loss compounds in three directions.

• Direct: taps you paid for that reached nothing
• Indirect: the optimisation algorithm learning from a broken signal and shifting budget away from audiences that were fine
• Strategic: creative tests and funnel changes evaluated against contaminated numbers, so you draw wrong conclusions for months

The second and third usually cost more than the first, and neither shows up as a line item.

The compounding part

Every placement you add points at the same broken destination. Creators, emails, printed codes, new campaigns. The cost grows with your marketing rather than staying fixed.

What it takes to fix

Replacing one link in your highest-traffic placement is an afternoon. Everything else can follow gradually. That asymmetry, hours against months of contaminated data, is what makes this worth doing even when the direct loss looks modest.

The honest summary

If iOS social traffic is under a tenth of your acquisition, this is a footnote. If it is most of it, which is the common case for consumer apps, it is the largest single leak in the funnel and it is invisible in every report you look at.