LISA: [00:00:00] Hi, I'm Lisa Maynard, VP of Marketing at Awin.

Welcome to the Performance Marketer's Toolkit, the series where we explore the biggest challenges modern marketers face and the solutions to overcome them.

In each episode, we'll look at a real world marketing challenge and how brands are solving it through the agility of the affiliate channel and the help of Awin's tech.

Today we're talking about growing a transactional app. Year of the mobile? We're past that, thankfully. Mobile sales are now at over $4 trillion per year with roughly 54% being transacted through apps. With features like offline access, OneTap checkout, and push notifications, apps give marketers a broad range of retention and conversion plays. But for your app to really work, you need to get the message out there. And that's where things start to unravel.

Expanding privacy laws make it harder to attribute all those app installs and conversions directly back to your marketing campaigns. Looking specifically at your affiliate program, Awin's analysis shows that roughly 20% of [00:01:00] app sales that should be attributed to your partners and creators won't be tracked. And it doesn't stop there.

Because traditional links don't always recognize when someone has an app installed, your users often get sent to the wrong pages or stuck on mobile sites. And get this: you might not even notice this is happening because you lost those users to attribution gaps. Like with any technical issue, you need a specialist to crack the code and the affiliate channel is packed with them.

Take Button, a mobile technology partner that establishes clear app tracking in a way that safeguards user privacy. Button even fills the gaps that mobile measurement platforms miss.

Here's Amy Denton, of daily deal site Wowcher, talking about their use of Button via Awin's platform.

AMY: Prior to the relationship with Button, we do also work with MMPs. However, the data was in so many different platforms that it was really hard to aggregate and it was really hard for us to make accurate business decisions of where we should put our budget and be able to spend more money [00:02:00] to obviously achieve a positive ROI. And when we started working with Butter and firstly, they solved that need for us and that demand that we needed, we needed a consolidated view of affiliate app journeys.

We needed a view of the incrementality, so how many app installs affiliates were driving. As well as how many conversions were coming through affiliates via the app, and Button was able to really support us with that.

JO: So I mentioned earlier, 85 million user journeys are invisible to MMPs at the moment because of ATT and, and other various kind of challenges in that space.

LISA: That's Joanna Cornish, partner success director at Button.

JO: So Awin will redirect all of their traffic to Button. Button will essentially wrap that link. When that click happens, we send that click data to AppsFlyer. We give them that information that has previously been missing, and then they're able to attribute everything downstream from installs to conversions.

LISA: In just one month, Wowcher was making smarter investments and seeing real app growth.

Affiliate platforms like Awin are full of these stories. Software development kits and postback integrations make it simple to [00:03:00] pass data from your app to a specialist like Button and onto Awin. That makes it possible to attribute installs and conversions directly to all the partners on your affiliate program.

The alternative is that you don't track all those sales. That means your partners don't get paid, and more importantly, you can't see the value they bring. And if you can't see it, you can't scale it. As for those partners, they're not sticking around. No commission, no promotion.

Crowds of Awin advertisers now have that visibility thanks to app tracking.

In 2025, solutions like Button helped Awin advertisers track 29 million mobile app sales worth $1.6 billion in revenue. But the bigger story is around just how fast those figures are growing at brands like Wowcher.

JO: Wowcher are very app first focused. Seeing the way they think about mobile, how they look at lifetime value, how valuable an installed customer is, you know, once you get that customer having that app on your device, you're seeing three to five times higher conversion rates. And initially when we launched, we saw 29% of [00:04:00] orders happening in the app.

CLEM: Mm-hmm.

JO: And that's now shifted to 50% of orders. And that's from driving installs, getting those customers more sticky, but also just making sure those customers are landing in the app when it's installed.

AMY: It gives us confidence that we're making the right business decision, that we're putting our budgets in the right areas.

LISA: Budgets in the right areas - isn't that what we're all looking for?

Thanks for joining me on this episode of the Performance Marketers Toolkit. Join us next time as we tackle another marketing challenge and show how Awin helps marketers enhance their performance.

[ BLOOPER ]

Okay. Year of mobile? We're past that, thankfully. Like something?

PRODUCER: Yeah, a little bit too Clueless, but-

LISA: Yeah.

PRODUCER: Um.

LISA: Should I twist my hair? Just kidding.

PRODUCER: Year of mobile? As if!

LISA: Yeah! I could do that.