Mobile IAP Revenue
App Store Data Support: Track Your Purchases and Payments
By Amir M. in App Store Data
August 29, 2021
A comprehensive overview of all you need to know about tracking purchase and payment data for your app. Plus, tips for how to make the most of the insights.

If you’re an app owner or developer, you probably know that the real value of your app is the data it generates through usage. And—equally valuable—the way that you use that data. While there are myriads of ways to go about data analytics, some data insights are more obvious and more readily available than others.

**So, let’s get down to the nitty-gritty, and talk about everything you could be doing with your data—but were afraid to ask. **

Application stores, such as Apple’s App Store and the Google Play store, offer server-to-server integration services, giving you access to raw data, so you can monitor the functioning of your mobile product. In this way, you have a chance to understand how events such as new releases and in-app purchases affect user engagement and spending.

By following these processes closely, you get the bigger picture: you come to understand what motivates purchases and how they shape user journeys. By accumulating this knowledge, you grasp larger developments and trends that affect your revenue. Thus equipped, you can take appropriate action.

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Likely, this is nothing new to you. Take App Store Connect, for instance. It enables developers to manage their apps and their in-app purchases, monitor sales and conduct testing. What’s more, Apple’s server-to-server service called App Store Notifications allows you to stay on top of user purchases and financial decisions. Through such notifications, you will learn about new subscriptions, as well as renewals, subscription upgrades and downgrades, redeemed offers, refund requests, and the like. Similarly, Google’s Subscriptions and In-App Purchases API will tell you about cancelled orders, consumed items, and allow you to check the status of user purchases.

Many app owners employ app analytics platforms to have valuable data collected, displayed and examined. Scalability tends to be a key issue, especially for gaming app developers: when your user count explodes, you may lose control of data. So, here’s where analytics providers take over—

The insights they offer include new installs, session lengths, as well as all kinds of metrics that give you a picture of user behavior. Of course, the market is huge, and you will find different levels of insight depending on the analytics platform you choose. Some are equipped with AI powerful enough to tell you, for example, at which stage and for what exact reason users abandoned your app, detailing the whole process down to the very minutiae, which in turn allows you to fix glitches and adjust your product to meet your users’ demands.

Based on a basic Google search for analytics providers, they typically offer services such as generating user profiles, tracking installs and uninstalls, measuring your app’s performance and user behavior, as well as users’ responses to marketing campaigns. If you look at the plethora of dashboards and charts they produce, it may seem like a full package. But let’s look beyond the obvious data to collect and analyze:

While many analytics platforms track purchases, including what happens afterward, this doesn’t necessarily mean full transparency or complete knowledge. You will certainly find out about service activations and preliminary approvals from the app store, but that’s not enough to ensure you that the purchase went smoothly.

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How often do you stop your purchase at the payment stage?

Maybe you were just playing around and didn’t really want to buy the item, or perhaps second thoughts hit you just as you were finalizing the payment? Sometimes it may take more time for the second thoughts to fully sink in—and you end up cancelling your order. Equally, countless online transactions fail due to the wrong input of credit card data, failure to authenticate the transaction, or payment decline for any other reason.

To know the specifics of user purchases, you need access to the store’s raw data. This data needs to be synced with your analytics provider. Only then will you have a full picture of user journeys, complete with all the processes that make up your revenue.

Attrackt offers app store end-point support, making sure all your purchase data is fully synced and your analytics dashboards are complemented with store payments information. It might sound painful, but knowing when users fail to pay you actually goes a long way. Even more so, it’s good to know that the mobile transactions you offer are user-friendly, transparent, and trustworthy. Right?

App Store Data Support: Track Your Purchases and Payments
A comprehensive overview of all you need to know about tracking purchase and payment data for your app. Plus, tips for how to make the most of the insights.
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