...And that means you are only making commissions from a single store and leaving your international traffic with a bad experience.

Overview

There are two problems for publishers using the iTunes Affiliate Program. First, each country's store is different and a single link typically won't work for more then one store often leaving your international traffic at a dead end and an error. Second, your current implementation of the iTunes affiliate program will only commission you on sales from a single country's store. These become major problems when you have world wide traffic.

Problem 1 - Poor User Experience

There are over 90 iTunes and App Stores worldwide. Each store is different. There are different catalog sizes for the different types of media that are available. There are different requirements to create an account. More importantly, there different identifiers for the same content as licensing and rights to sale the content change country to country. This creates the unique problem that a single link from your site or app won't work for all your global traffic to direct them to their intended destination. Of the massive catalog of content in the iTunes and App Store there are very few links that work across all stores.

This leads to the problem of poor user experience. With massive world-wide market share that iTunes has most of your traffic that clicks on an iTunes link will have an account set up for only the country they live in. When there is a difference between their default store and the store your original link was built for the user will typically end up with an error.

A click to change the store will allow the user to see the content in the suggested store but not be able to purchase it, their original goal, as iTunes limits purchases to only those with a local credit card or bank account.

Your user did not have a seamless experience and they now cannot purchase the content they originally came for.

The GeoRiot service solves this problem with our geotargeting and translation engine. Read more on the Solutions page.

Problem 2 - No Single Program

Of the over 90 iTunes and App Stores worldwide 19 of them have affiliate programs. These include the stores in the United States, Canada, 14 countries in Europe, Australia, New Zealand and Japan. Each program will only provide commissions for sales in that specific country's store. There is no single program that will provide commission for all your global traffic.

This problem is further complicated as there are four different affiliate networks that administer the affiliate programs in the 19 different countries. This includes LinkShare, TradeDoubler, DGM-Pro and LinkShare Japan. Each of these affiliate networks use a different system to build and track their respective affiliate links. They have different types of user level tracking and have separate reporting dashboards.

While you could create multiple links for a specific piece of content in each country's store and lists these out the process is cumbersome and time intensive, requires your user to correctly choose the right link, typically doesn't look "clean" and does not scale well past just two or three countries.

If you have wish to capitalize on as much iTunes Affiliate Program commission as possible you need to use all 19 program simultaneously. This is exactly what the GeoRiot service provides in an easy to implement and manage solution.

Conclusion

If your site has global traffic or your app see international use you could be leaving users with a poor experience and be missing out on commission revenue. The GeoRiot service provides an easy solution for both. Learn more about how GeoRiot solves these problems or contact us now to get started.