Tapstream User Guide

1. Getting Started - How Tapstream Works - Setting Up Tapstream - App Events Worth Measuring - I Have Multiple Apps - Should I Use Taps.io Shortlinks or the Web Widget? - Can I Use a Custom Domain for My Shortlinks? 2. Using Tapstream - The Dashboard - Common Use-Cases - Creating Shortlinks - Creating Events - Deleting Events - Create Shortlinks On-The-Fly - Smart Redirects for Shortlinks - Lifetime Value (Earnings) - Funnels

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Creating Shortlinks

Creating shortlinks is the easiest way to start measuring the success of your app marketing.

1) Find the Shortlinks tab in your dashboard and click the "Create Taps.io shortlink" button.

2) Fill in the details for your shortlink. Choose a friendly name, a destination (like your app store page).

Note: URL customization is for PRO accounts and above.

3) Once you've created your shortlink use it anywhere on the web - an ad, email, social media update, app download button etc. - and learn how well your marketing channels are converting traffic into new users.

Testing shortlinks and viewing results

Click on any shortlink to test it and then check the Shortlinks tab of your dashboard to ensure a hit has been recorded.

Hits (clicks) are recorded in real-time and successful conversions will appear within an hour.

Note: in order to measure conversions, you must first set up events for your app. Learn how to create shortlinks on-the-fly (Pro accounts and above)

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Funnels

Setting Up Funnels in Tapstream

Head inside your dashboard and click the “Funnels” tab. Funnels are visible for anyone on a Pro or Corporate plan. 

Click “Create a Funnel,” give it a name, and save it.

Defining your funnel

Choose the path you’d like to investigate from start to finish. You can add as many hits or events as you like and its ok for funnels to include just hits or just events.

Note: Once you’ve finished creating your funnel it can take up to 60 minutes for Tapstream to compute the data you’ve asked for. We expect this to come down in the future.

1) Choose the first step of your funnel - a Hit or an Event. Advanced options for Hits are covered below.

  2) Decide if you want to anchor the first step. 

Selecting “Start anchored” means that the first step of your funnel must be the first interaction a user has ever had with Tapstream - other users will not be included.

3) Choose “Any tracker” or “A particular tracker” for each step. “Any tracker” will include all users who you’ve tracked with Tapstream, whereas selecting “a particular tracker” will only include users who can be identified by the tracker you select.

4) Add a second step to your funnel

5) Decide if the connection between your funnel steps should be “Loose” or “Strict.” Choosing “Loose” will include users who have gone through additional steps in between the steps you’re measuring. Choosing “Strict” will cut out those users.

6) Add as many more steps as you wish

7) Choose if you’d like to anchor the final step. Selecting “End anchored” means that the last step of your funnel must be the last interaction a user has ever had. If not, the user won’t be included.

8) Save changes and hold tight while your data is calculated and view results (up to 60 minutes).

Advanced options for Hits

  Referrer: only view hits that were a result of a visit from a given refering website.

For example, imagine Mashable covers your app and sends many visits to your site. Your site has our JavaScript, so it knows that these visitors came from Mashable. You can isolate any resulting user paths from these hits.

Tag: limit hits to only include ones with a specific Tapstream shortlink tag.

Title: limit hits to only include hits that came from a website page with that title.

Path: limit hits that came from a given page or set of pages on your website. “Path” means the part of the URL after the domain name. For example: the path of http://example.com/path is “/path”

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Deleting events

At the moment there is no way to delete an event, however, soon you'll have the ability to hide any event you don't wish to see in your dashboard.

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Creating new events

To create new events you must add them directly into your app.

Event setup documentation

"But wait a second! Inside my dashboard there seems to be an option to creating a new event!?"

Creating a new event from inside your dashboard

This feature is meant for marketing teams who want to setup the events to be measured.

1) Go the "App Events" tab in your dashboard and click the "Create a new event type" button.

2) Choose a slug, friendly name and assign a dollar value to your event it if it generates revenue for you. Click Save Changes and you'll see the new event in your dashboard.

3) Notify your technical team of the events you'd like added to your app, so they can implement them for you. Adding an event to your dashboard, without setting it up in your app, is useless.

Event setup documentation

Instead of setting up every in-app event possible, we recommend focusing on just a few key events that define your highest value user behaviour, so you can focus your user acquisition strategy.

See also: App Events Worth Measuring

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Measuring Customer Lifetime Value (Earnings)

Tapstream is all about helping you learn where your most valuable users come from, so you can get more.

By attaching a dollar value to in-app events that generate revenue, you can measure customer lifetime value for your app, in total, and on a per channel basis - i.e. is that Twitter and Facebook marketing working best for you, or are those mobile ad buys bringing in bigger returns?

Attaching a dollar value to in-app events

Let's assume you're app is free and you offer in-app purchases, and you've already set up an event to track them (see: event setup documentation).

Head to the "App Events" tab of your dashboard

Click the pencil icon beside your event to edit it

Assign a value to it

Assuming you're in-app purchase costs the user $3.00, assign a $2.10 value to it, since Apple bites off their 30% piece of the pie.

To see how well one marketing channel performs over another, like Facebook vs. Twitter, use unique shortlinks for each one.

Now that you've attached a value to your event, the earnings metrics inside your dashboard will begin to come alive:

earnings per event (App events tab)

earnings per shortlink (Shortlinks tab)

earnings per webpage (Website tab)

earnings by campaign (add results for all shortlinks and web pages used in the same campaign)

and overall earnings (Dashboard tab)

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Smart Redirects for Shortlinks

Tapstream shortlinks can detect which device someone is using and redirect them according to predetermined instructions you provide.

Using a single shortlink you can send traffic to the correct app store,

  send traffic to a device-specific landing page,

  and you can still split-test multiple landing pages for a single device.

  Setting up smart redirects for your shortlinks

Create a CNAME and point it toward Tapstream so that all of your shortlinks use your custom domain. This feature is available to all paying customers.

In the “Shortlinks” tab of your dashboard, create a new shortlink or edit an existing one - you'll see following “Redirectors” section at the bottom of your screen:

Note: you must setup an “Any” device type option, which ensures there is a fallback destination for any devices you haven't defined a redirect for.

A quick example to finish up: If you have 2 iPhone destination, 1 Android destinations, and 1 Any destination, the 2 iPhone destinations will be split-tested against each other and the rest of the traffic will behave normally.

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Common Use-Cases

After watching our customers spend millions of dollars marketing their apps, we've noticed six common ways they like to use Tapstream:

Acquire users... Buy Traffic on the Mobile Web

Traffic on the mobile web is under-priced for a hand full of reasons, so take advantage of that. While most people are buying traffic on a CPM (cost per thousand impressions) or CPC (cost per click) basis, unaware of their conversions, you can buy the same traffic and measure it on a CPA (cost per acquisition) basis, because Tapstream tells you if a click turns into an app user. Find which traffic sources deliver high quality users, and focus your ad spend where you see a high return. A few of our customers are really killing it with this strategy.

Advertise on a mobile ad network

Buy advertising inventory on a mobile ad network and see how well your traffic converts into app users. Don’t know if we support the ad network you’re using? Just ask. If we don’t, we can get you set up in a jiffy. Inbound marketing and organic traffic

This is where Tapstream really shines, as no other attribution solutions offer the ability to measure conversions from organic traffic like: social media, community outreach, email campaigns; and inbound marketing efforts like content creation, blogging, contests and PR. Use Taps.io shortlinks directly in your campaigns and then place the JavaScript on your web pages to take care of the rest - like measuring the conversion rate of that coverage you got on TechCrunch.

We’ve also integrated our Taps.io url shortener into HootSuite, so you can automatically measure conversions for every social update you publish via HootSuite.

Learn...

The virality of shared content from your app

Whenever a user shares an experience or content from your app, make it so the links they share use Taps.io shortlinks. This way you will be able to measure how effective shared content is at bringing new users to the app:  when a new person encounters one of the links your user has shared on a social network and clicks it, that new person will be fingerprinted and you can see if they become one of your users. Just search “Taps.io” on Twitter to see how our customers are using it. Content performance for news outlets and publishers

You’re a news outlet or active content creator and you want to know which of your pages or articles is driving the most sign-ups for your app. Use the invisible web widget, a snippet of JavaScript, on your website’s pages to automatically track which articles and pages are converting the most visitors into app users. A page-by-page break-down of results will be waiting inside your dashboard. Split-testing

Improve your conversion rates by split-testing your ads, landing pages, CTAs, social updates or email campaigns. Simply use a unique Taps.io shortlink for each variant you’re testing and discover the winners. Design and copy play a huge roll in sales, and now you can measure both to rope-in more users.

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Creating Shortlinks On-The-Fly

In order to start creating shortlinks on-the-fly without having to touch your dashboard, follow these steps: 

1. Setup a CNAME and point it to Tapstream. This ensures your links look good and are branded as your own. Use something like: app.yourdomain.com.

2. Create links on-the-fly by adding a slug to your custom domain like this: http://app.example.com/new-slug

For example: you could tweet a URL like http://app.example.com/twitter-feb-promo and a corresponding shortlink with the name "twitter-feb-promo" will automatically be created in your Tapstream dashboard, under the Shortlinks tab.  

Create your shortlinks on-the-fly and place them anywhere you want to measure the conversion rate of incoming traffic: in social media updates, content you create, ads, split tests etc. Your marketing genius is the only limit.

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Can I Use a Custom Domain For My Shortlinks?

Yes, we support CNAMEs for Pro and Corporate customers.

See using a custom domain with Tapstream for setup instructions.

We actually recommend using a custom domain, because, once you've done so, you can create shortlinks on-the-fly without ever touching your dashboard. Measuring your marketing becomes almost effortless.

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Platforms Tapstream Supports

We support iOS, Android, Mac, Windows 8 and Windows Phone.

If you’re using another platform, we have an open-source SDK which you can build on.

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The Dashboard

The Tapstream Dashboard

Let's get you better acquainted with your dashboard shall we? After all, it will be your home-base for measuring vital in-app user metrics and your user acquisition performance.

We don't just like to help you get more users, we help you keep them.

Dashboard Tab

Your Overall Marketing Performance

The graph you see when you open the dashboard tab showcases your app's daily active users in a total users vs. tracked attributed users format.

Note: 

An attributed user is anyone who went through one of your Taps.io shortlinks, OR touched one of your web pages that included the web widget, and then triggered an event in your app - an activation, for example.

A non-attributed user is anyone who did not pass through your Taps.io shortlinks, AND did not touch one of your web pages that included the web widget (JavaScript snippet).

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Below the graph you’ll see some useful summary stats to help you get an idea of your “bottom line,” if you will, for the chosen date range.

The summary stats include:

Avg. daily users - average number of users that used your app, per day

Attributed users - total number of users attributed to your shortlinks and website

All hits - the total number of clicks on your shortlinks and visits on your website

Conversion rate - the percentage of hits that resulted in an attributed user (Attributed Users / All Hits)

Total Earnings - the total value of all events triggered by users of your app (downloads, in-app purchases etc.)

Website Tab

Your Page-by-Page Performance and Top Referrers

The website graph shows a day-by-day breakdown of how many hits your website received and how of your app users were matched to those hits. 

How to interpret the data: on March 10, your website (the pages which you installed the JavaScript on) had 1,021 total visitors and 7 of those visitors turned into your app users.

  Off to the right of the website graph you’ll also see totals for your chosen date range:

Page hits - total visitors on your site (where JavaScript is installed)

Users - total app users attributed to your site 

Earnings - the value of all app events generated by app users who are attributed to your site

Your top three referrers

Below the main website graph and stats box you’ll see:  Your website’s page-by-page performance - a breakdown of how well each of your site’s pages is at converting visitors into app users - including conversion rates and total earnings.

Referring website performance - a breakdown of all referring sites, including hits, conversions, conversion rate, and total earnings.

Shortlinks Tab

The Shortlink performance graph shows you a daily breakdown of shortlink hits vs. converting hits - when someone clicks a shortlink and then triggers an event in your app, like an activation.

How to interpret the data: on March 10, your shortlinks received 27 clicks and 2 of those people turned into your app users.

Similar to the Website tab, off to the right of the graph you'll see totals for hits, attributed users, and total earnings related to your shortlinks.

And below the graph, you’ll see a more detailed performance breakdown for each one of your shortlinks: total hits, total attributed users, conversion rates and total earnings.

App Events Tab

Create events, view their performance and inject your dashboard with earnings

App events is one of the most unique areas of Tapstream.

Here you’ll see a list of all the events you’ve setup, how many times each event has been generated and your earnings per event.

By assigning a dollar value to an event that generates revenue, you can now begin measuring customer lifetime value for your app.

Upon creating or editing an event you’ll see an option to assign a dollar value to it.

  An example - tracking earnings from app downloads: the trick here is you can't actually track when someone downloads your app, you can only track the first time someone runs your app - the activation. If your app cost $0.99 in the App Store, assign a $0.70 value to the event, since Apple takes their slice of the pie. 

Example Note: measuring income on an activation basis instead of by downloads leads to under-reporting your earnings. That said, under-reporting is better than over-reporting.

Once you’ve assigned a value to your event, you’ll see the earnings metrics throughout your dashboard come to life, allowing you to measure:

earnings per event (App events tab)

earnings per shortlink (Shortlinks tab)

earnings per webpage (Website tab)

earnings by campaign (add results for all shortlinks and web pages used in the same campaign)

and overall earnings (Dashboard tab)

Funnels Tab

Learn how users travel into your app, to your website and back

Setting up funnels allows you to investigate the paths your users take toward a goal, see how many people make it past each step and where they drop out. Once you better understand a user's journey, you can adjust your communications and design to encourage people to take the path you want, improving engagement and monetization.

See our guide for step-by-step instructions on setting up funnels.

Review Bar Tab

Review bar is a simple way to get more 5 star reviews by prompting your app users to review your app when they visit your website. Now all reviews and comments made through Review Bar will have a home right in your Tapstream dashboard.

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App Events Worth Measuring

Consider measuring:

Activations (a must) Registration and profile customization Add Social account (connect social acct) Re-engagement In-app purchases (a must) Content engagement Social share Ad engagement

Activations - the first time your app is run This is the most barebones, yet key, integration to get started learning more about your users. It serves as the starting point to track a user’s journey through your app so you can improve their overall experience. Even if activations are as far as you go with user tracking, at the very least you can discover what source referred the user, drove that person, to activate your app - a very important detail that will help your marketing team lower the cost of customer acquisition and increase user growth. Registration and profile customization New users are extremely sensitive, so when they complete a registration barrier it’s a big deal. If you ask me for something I don’t expect, create a UX flow that annoys me or simply don’t answer a question I’m unsure of, I’m gone. It means nothing to me to uninstall your app at this point. There is no emotional connection whatsoever, and that’s exactly what you want to build. To do that you need to get the person past registration, to begin experiencing your app. The best way to do this is to measure the occurrence of key registration, setup, or profile customization events. Understanding what is blocking people from moving forward will help you tear down the fence so more can make it to the other side. Do this and you’ll get the chance to impress people, potentially creating a bond between user and app. Social profile connection When I link one of my social profiles to your app, I’m ready to jive. I want to create a deeper level of interaction to your app and either experience it with other people and potentially share it with my friends. The more social functions that are built into the app that actually enrich it’s use or entertainment factor the better chance I’ll share it and enjoy it. Learn how to increase social profile connections and you’ll not only have the chance to make your app more engaging, but you’ll increase your user growth -  assuming you actually deliver the value you say you will. Re-engagement - the second through N’th run of your app Retention is an incredibly critical piece to your success. In other words, how can you reduce the number of users dropping out from using your app - your churn rate? This is exactly what measuring re-engagement can help you learn. Did I return to your app after I signed-up? Once? Twice? Is this number increasing or decreasing with each of your releases? Be able to see where you’re losing users is vital to tweaking the experience so that they stick around. You can’t monetize the users that don’t come back now can you? This brings us to the holy grail for many apps... In-app purchases Users play, customers pay. Are you able to turn your free users into paying customers with upgrades and add-ons? For a large number of apps this is the ultimate goal: monetizing users and profiting from all your hard work.

Keep a strong hold on your engagement metrics to ensure users stick around long enough that you can entice them to upgrade to a premium experience. The best part? You can learn where these paying customers come from and get more of them. Content engagement Am I using the features you thought I would use? How does this change throughout the time I spend with your app - i.e. do I start using certain features in your app later on? Maybe it’s because the feature is for power users, maybe it’s too hidden away. You can figure that part out, and analytics will give you the raw data to do just that. Social Shares - when a user shares content out of your app Whether social aspects are the fibre of your app or just there for sharing, you want to get people blabbing about your app. And to do that, you need to find out which parts of the user experience people like blabbing about. I might enjoy sharing when I beat my friend in a game of Draw Something, or when I make a new personal record for something fitness related. Is it competition that drives sharing? Is it achievements? It might be something else. You should probably find out what that is. Get people talking. Ad engagement - when a user interacts with an ad unit (clicks, installs an app, watches a video) If you’re showing ads, knowing which ads people respond to is critical to improve how you use them to achieve your goals. Is a user who came from Twitter more likely to click an ad than a user that came from Facebook? You make money every time a person clicks or installs an app from your ad, so you owe it to yourself to figure out where these ad-clicking app-installing users come from.

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Measuring Multiple Apps

Tapstream accounts support an unlimited number of apps.

In order to measure each app separately, name your events differently for each app.

Our SDK automatically fires install and open events with the following naming convention, so you would benefit from naming your other events in a similar format:

[platform]-[app-name]-install

[platform]-[app-name]-open

Example: If you have 2 games, on 2 different platforms you might name your events like this:

iOS-gameA-referral

iOS-gameA-level2

Android-gameA-referral

Android-gameA-level2

iOS-gameB-referral

iOS-gameB-level2

Android-gameB-referral

Android-gameB-level2

Here are the Docs for events (pick your platform on the right): https://tapstream.com/developer/ Now, in order to see results for those events you need to begin using either Tapstream’s invisible web widget to track traffic coming through your website, or place Taps.io shortlinks in your web, email, social, or mobile campaigns. Let’s assume your marketing two apps on the same website like so:

Each "Available in the App Store" badge should use a Taps.io shortlink in order to measure conversion results for the events you’ve setup. When creating Taps.io shortlinks, we recommend including your app’s name in each link’s ‘friendly name’ for easy reference in your Tapstream dashboard.

1. Login to your Tapstream dashboard and scroll down to the "Shortlinks" section.

2. Find the "Add Shortlink" button on the right, click it, and follow the instructions...

3. Create a friendly name for your shortlink so you know what it refers to: something like "Game 1 landing page”

4. Choose a destination url for your shortlink.

5. Finally, place the shortlink where you want to begin collecting data (in this case, the App Store button)

Follow the same steps again to create more shortlinks. Once created, you can view all your shortlinks inside your dashboard by their friendly name and url.

Documentation: https://tapstream.com/developer/trackers/

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Note: Pro and Corporate customers can also customize the slug of their shortlinks (assuming the chosen name has not already been used). Shortlink slugs are auto-generated for Indie accounts.

Example: http://taps.io/slug (case sensitive, use hyphens in between word)

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Alright, so you’ve created a shortlink for each "Available in the App Store" badge - taps.io/game1 and taps.io/game2 . When you’re interpreting the conversion results in your dashboard don’t be surprised if you see the taps.io/game1 link causing conversions to the events you’ve setup in game2: taps.io/game1 will have a conversion breakdown something like this:

game1-activation: 1,000 conversions

game1-share: 500 conversions

game1-level2: 200 conversions

game2-activation: 26 conversions

game2-share: 10 conversions

game2-level2: 4 conversions

Note that game2 is getting some conversions from the game1 link. This is because it is basically guaranteed that some customers will click on the taps.io/game1 link, and then (whether they use game1 or not) download game2.

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Should I Use Taps.io Shortlinks or the Web Widget?

Already know how Tapstream works? Then it’s time to start learning about your app marketing success. Should I use Shortlinks or the Web Widget to track incoming visitors? For an ideal integration we highly recommend using both. But if you’re just beginning, pick one just to get started. Both options provide attribution and conversion rates for your app marketing. No more swinging in the dark! Shortlinks - great for specific traffic sources and split-testing Creating shortlinks is the best way to get started. They're great for measuring traffic from specific places and split-testing.

Place shortlinks in:

Sales pages and landing pages

Social media bios, updates and promotions

Blogs

Email campaigns

Web or mobile ads

Anything you want to split test

Use shortlinks anytime you can control the link being used.  A perfect counter example is getting press: you can’t control what link a journalist is uses her article. If you could, you should give her a shortlink! Get started: Create some shortlinks

See also: Can I Use a Custom Domain for My Shortlinks? Web Widget - great for any traffic moving through your website Adding the invisible web widget (JavaScript snippet) to your site allows you to:

View referral sources for website visitors that install your app

See which of your pages converts the most visitors into app users

The web widget is compliments the use of shortlinks as it automatically measures traffic coming through your site that wasn’t initiated by a shortlink. Get Started: Add the web widget to your site 

Note on attribution: what ever gets the first touch, a shortlink or your web widget, will be considered the source for that app user.

Example: If a user clicks on a shortlink you tweeted, goes to your website and then downloads your app, the user will be attributed to the shortlink - the first touch.

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Setting Up Tapstream for Your App

Just getting started? Read: How Tapstream Works. Start measuring your marketing in three steps:

1) Add an SDK to your app. We have pre built SDKs for iOS, Android, Mac, Windows 8 and Windows Phone, as well as an open source SDK if you’re building on other platforms.

2) Setup multiple in-app events to measure. Here are some ideas, and the documentation (pick your platform) to get you started.

3) Choose how you want to measure incoming traffic. The article Should i use Taps.io Shortlinks or the Web Widget will help you decide where to start. Each method compliments the other and we recommend using both to get a complete picture of your app marketing performance.

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How Tapstream Works

Tapstream helps you learn how to get more users, and then it focuses you on acquiring the high value kind. We do this by telling you where your users come from and by attaching their in-app behaviours to that same source - something called attribution.

By adding our SDK to your app, setting up some key events - like activations and in-app purchases - and then using shortlinks or a web widget to track incoming traffic, you can successfully tie your marketing efforts - mobile and web, paid or organic - to their results.

The measurement flow looks like this:

A visitor clicks one of your Taps.io shortlinks or lands on your site which has the Tapstream Web Widget. The visitor is fingerprinted and a ‘hit’ is registered.

If that person proceeds to trigger an event in your app, and if the fingerprint of the hit matches the fingerprint of the user triggering the event, you have a conversion.

Hit > Event triggered > Fingerprint of hit matches fingerprint of user triggering the event > A conversion! See also: Should I Use Taps.io Shortlinks or the Web Widget? Every successful conversion, is attributed to the channel that drove it. Anytime a new user ends up in your app, you’ll know where he came from. Note: whichever shortlink or web widget the visitor touches first is recorded as the referral source.

Once you’ve tracked a user into your app, all of their behaviour will be recorded, based on the events you’ve set up in your app, and be attributed to the original channel that brought in the user. An Example with shortlinks: 

Someone clicks the http:taps.io/try-my-app shortlink in your recent Facebook update, then installs your app and activates it.

Your Tapstream dashboard shows you that your http:taps.io/try-my-app shortlink generated a successful conversion - in this case, an activation.  

If that user continues on to make an in-app purchase, and you’ve setup in-app purchases as an event, then it will attribute the in-app purchase to http:taps.io/try-my-app as well.

See also: Should I Use Taps.io Shortlinks or the Web Widget?

Next up: Setting Up Tapstream