Determine whether an app launch came from an AdMob click

Question

I'm trying to figure out whether the users I get from ads will buy in-app purchases frequently enough to justify the cost.

Is there any way an iOS app can tell whether the user has clicked on an AdMob ad in the past? Their Download API only seems to show aggregate data. I'm open to using any other network if they let me do this!

If there's anything in the HTTP request from an ad which would give me the user's magical ISU string, I'd be happy to bounce ads through my own server and implement my own tracking.

Thanks!

Answer 1

AdMob doesn't have any way of querying for this.

I decided to bounce ads through my own server and have the app query it later. If the server finds an ad click which came from the:

• Same IP address
• Same Device type
• Same system version

it will tell the app that it came from a paid click.

Of course the problem with this is that I lose data on some unknown number of ad-click installations. I'd like to know how many I'm losing, but I don't know if there's a way to use AdMob's app conversion tracking together with ads which go to arbitrary URLs.