Question

I’m looking at integrating support for tracking Facebook’s new mobile app ads.

I’ve read the tutorial here:
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/tutorials/mobile-app-ads/

It says:

Include the following code to be executed when your app opens for the first time by user

[FBSettings publishInstall:appId];

So the first question is – where do I put this so that it only invokes the call if the install was driven from Facebook? I don’t want FB to get credit for someone who found my app themselves on the app store.

Do I need to manually track whether or not I’ve called the publishInstall before for this specific user? (The preamble sentence implies this – but the SDK documentation for publishInstall implies otherwise).

And even more confusing is that the SDK FBSettings reference includes shouldAutoPublishInstall which defaults to YES. This would suggest that I don’t need to do anything other than have the SDK integrated. So why does the tutorial not mention this as an option?

I assume that the appId is the associated Facebook appId (as opposed to the App Store App ID). This is also not clear from the documentation.

Answer 1

I browsed the sources of facebook iOS SDK, and it seems that guide is wrong.

You are right, that autoPublishInstall is set to YES by default, which means we don’t need to invoke [FBSettings publishInstall:appId]; manually. AppId is indeed the facebook app id.

When you invoke openActiveSessionWith.... method, it initializes FBSession with
initWithAppID:permissions:defaultAudience:urlSchemeSuffix:tokenCacheStrategy: which contains in the end [FBSettings autoPublishInstall:self.appID];

+ (void)autoPublishInstall:(NSString *)appID {
    if ([FBSettings shouldAutoPublishInstall]) {
        dispatch_once(&g_publishInstallOnceToken, ^{
            // dispatch_once is great, but not re-entrant.  Inside publishInstall we use FBRequest, which will
            // cause this function to get invoked a second time.  By scheduling the work, we can sidestep the problem.
            [[FBSettings class] performSelector:@selector(publishInstall:) withObject:appID afterDelay:FBPublishDelay];
        });
   }
}

So technically it should report the install out of the box (if I’m not missing something). I’m going to play with it a little more today to see if it works as expected and update answer with results.