7 reasons to track IAP with GetSocial

GetSocial now supports automatically tracking purchases your users make in your application with a simple setup.

Purchase information captured by GetSocial SDK includes:

• productId (SKU): as defined by you in iTunes Connect or Google Play Console
• product type: consumable/non-consumable/subscription
• product price: price converted to USD based on daily rates
• purchase time: time of the purchase
• purchase state: verified/fraudulent/unknown

You are already tracking and analyzing revenue metrics and might be wondering why you should track these with GetSocial and what additional (actionable) insights you can gain.

Why track IAP with GetSocial

GetSocial’s in-app purchase tracking is intended to be a value add to your existing revenue metrics and provides additional insights:

1. Create and target user segments based on their purchasing behavior
2. Compare purchase behavior of referred vs non-referred user
3. Identify the social value of your users (in addition to the LTV)
4. Identify the most purchased item pairs
5. Identify the time to purchase for each item (i.e which items are bought earlier in the user’s lifecycle and the frequency of those)
6. Creating Custom Facebook Lookalike Audiences with LTV
7. Purchase validation to identify fake transactions

1. Create and target user segments based on their purchasing behavior

You can create user segments and target notifications based on:

• First and last purchase date
• Total purchase amount i.e. total revenue generated by the user
• Number of purchases/transactions
• Social value (see above)

Once you create those user segments you can gain additional insights about the audience and compare them with other audiences:

• Avg LTV (Audience vs Rest)
• Avg Social Value (Audience vs Rest)
• Avg Transaction Value (Audience vs Rest)

2. Compare purchase behavior of referred vs non-referred user

In addition to gaining insights into standard revenue metrics like total revenues, the number of transactions, time to first purchase (i.e. how long it takes for a user to become a paying user), ARPPU (Average revenue per paying user) and ARPDAU (Average revenue per DAU) you will be able to compare the purchase behavior of referred vs non-referred user  with the following metrics:

• Average revenue per transaction
• Conversion rate i.e. percent of users who made a purchase
• Revenue per acquisition channel/campaign/medium

3. Identify the social value of your users

The social value of a user is the sum of the LTV of all users that were referred successfully by this user. In other words, this user referred his friends to install your app who eventually became paying users. Such users are valuable as they influence their friends to install your app, driving high-quality paying users to your app.

Having identified the social value of your users, you can create a user segment from the GetSocial dashboard and target these users to ensure you re-engage and retain them. You should also encourage these users to keep referring their friends.

4. Identify the most purchased item pairs

In this analysis, we look at the duration between the purchases of 2 items giving you an indication of which item is more likely to be purchased if a user has purchased another item before. From the example below, you can see that item 2 is purchased on average 5 days after item 1 and the frequency of this item pair is also higher compared to other. With this knowledge, you can target all users who have purchased item 1 with a promotion for item 2

5. Identify the time to purchase for each item

For each purchased item in your app, we calculate on average how long it takes from the user’s first session to purchase that item. This gives you an indication on which items are popular at which stages of the user’s lifecycle and use this information to promote such products at the right time. Example, if a product’s time to purchase is on average 5 days then you can promote the product when user’s lifetime is around 5 days since the likelihood of purchasing that product is higher than the other products.

6. Creating Custom Facebook Lookalike Audiences with LTV

Lookalike audiences are groups of Facebook users that share similar attributes to your existing user segments. You can now export any user segment you create on GetSocial and the exported file will include LTV data for those users.

This enables you to narrow your targeting and generate better ROI on Facebook by acquiring users that generate the desired behavior e.g. users that are highly social, those who successfully refer other users, those you make purchases etc

7. Purchase Validation

As you are aware, not all the in-app purchases in your app are real. There are many factors that result in IAP fraud such as a jailbroken device, hijacked app store request etc. GetSocial IAP tracking, therefore, comes with purchase validation solution which allows you to distinguish valid purchase events from the non-valid ones.

See the SDK documentation for more information on how to configure purchase validation on the Dashboard and update to the latest version of our SDK for your app.