Free App Install Campaign Link Generator

Google Play does not read utm_source, utm_medium, or utm_campaign from the store URL. It reads exactly one parameter, referrer, and stores whatever sits inside it. The convention everyone settled on is to put a query string in there, which means the value of one query parameter is itself a query string. Google's own example is unambiguous about what that looks like:

Look at what changed: every = inside the referrer became %3D and every & became %26. That is the outer encoding pass, and skipping it is the single most common mistake in app campaign setup. An unencoded ampersand does not stay inside the referrer value, it ends it. The browser hands Play a URL with three top-level parameters, Play keeps the first pair as the referrer, and utm_medium and utm_campaign are discarded as parameters it does not recognise. The link still works, the store page still opens, and your report quietly loses two thirds of its dimensions.

The inner pass matters for a different reason. If a campaign name contains a space, an ampersand, a plus sign, or a hash, that character has to be encoded before it goes into the referrer string, and then encoded again with everything else. A space becomes %20 on the way in, and %2520 in the finished URL. It looks wrong the first time you see it, and it is correct: Play decodes once when it stores the value, your app or SDK decodes once more when it parses the pairs, and the campaign name comes out the other end with the space intact.

Google also fixes the size of the whole thing: the referrer string must be URL encoded, 512 characters or less. Because the count is on the encoded form, a referrer that looks like 300 characters in your notes can be 380 in the URL. Every = and every & costs three characters instead of one, and every space in a value costs six. The counter above the Play output tracks the real number.

On Android the referrer is not a report, it is a payload. Your app calls the Play Install Referrer API after first launch and gets back the referrer string exactly as you wrote it, alongside the referrer click timestamp, the install begin timestamp (both a client-side and a server-side version of each), the app version at the time of first install, and whether the user interacted with your instant experience in the previous seven days. Whatever analytics you use, an SDK or your own backend, reads that string and splits it into the utm pairs you built here. The device needs the Play Store app at version 8.3.73 or later for the call to succeed.

On iOS the flow is the opposite: nothing reaches your app. Apple keeps the campaign data and reports it inside App Store Connect Analytics, grouped by the campaign token you chose. That is why the Apple side of this generator is so much smaller than the Play side, and why the token names matter so much: the token text is the entire report. Apple also gates the feature on data, so a campaign link cannot be generated until the app has analytics to attach it to.

Both of those measure installs, not clicks. Neither store tells you how many people saw the link and never tapped it, which is the number that tells you whether a placement is working at all. That gap is why most teams put a short link in front of the store URL: the short link counts the click, the store counts the install, and the ratio between them is your store-page conversion rate per placement. Our campaign URL QA checker is worth a pass before you ship, because it catches the tags that got mangled somewhere between this page and your ad platform.