Your campaign is missing from App Store Connect. Here is the order to check.

Why is my campaign not showing in App Store Connect?

Almost every “my campaign is not showing” report resolves to one of three limits, and Apple publishes all three on the same help page that documents the link format. They are worth knowing by heart, because two of them describe a working campaign that is being withheld rather than a broken one.

The five-user threshold is the one that catches small teams, and it is a suppression rather than a zero: the row is withheld because the number is too small to show, not because the number is nothing. A campaign that drove four installs looks identical in the console to a campaign that drove none. For an indie app testing a single influencer post, that is the ordinary case rather than the edge case.

The third threshold is different in kind, and it is the only one of the three where installs really are lost. Someone who taps your link on Tuesday and installs on Thursday is a real install that will never be attributed to that campaign — Apple counts a First-Time Download against a campaign only when the download happens within 24 hours of the click. Consideration cycles longer than a day are structurally invisible here, and no link tool changes that.

Then check the link itself, in this order

Once the thresholds are ruled out, work down the URL.

1. Confirm pt is present and is yours. The provider token identifies your developer account. Apple generates it automatically the first time you create a campaign link in App Store Connect, and the same value is reused for every campaign afterwards — so there is exactly one right answer per account, and it is already in the console. A link carrying ct without pt still opens your product page, which is why the failure is silent.
2. Confirm ct is inside the limit. Up to 30 alphanumeric characters and spaces. A campaign name assembled from a date, a channel and a creative name overruns this quickly.
3. Confirm you are reading the right view. Apps → your app → the Analytics tab → Acquisition → Campaigns, then Add Filter → Campaign to narrow to one. Campaign data does not appear in the Sales and Trends reports, which is a different system answering a different question.
4. Confirm the click actually reached Apple with the parameters attached. This is the step most checklists skip, and on social channels it is the one that fails.

Why does step 4 fail on social channels?

A campaign link published in an Instagram or TikTok bio is opened inside that app’s in-app browser rather than the phone’s real browser. The hand-off from that in-app browser to the App Store can fail outright, leaving a blank page — in which case no install happens at all and there is nothing to attribute.

The failure is silent from every angle you would normally look: the link is not rejected, nothing logs an error, and the URL is not malformed. From inside App Store Connect it is indistinguishable from a campaign nobody clicked.

Two taps tell you which one you have. Open the link from the app you published it in, on a real phone, and see whether the store opens. Then open the same link from the phone’s browser. If the second works and the first does not, the campaign is fine and the hand-off is what is failing — and no amount of parameter checking will surface it, because the parameters were never the problem.

What can the campaigns report actually tell you?

Worth being precise about, because it decides whether this system is the right one for your question at all.

It can tell you how many first-time downloads, product page views, impressions and — where you sell — sales and subscriptions a named campaign produced, filtered to a date range.

It cannot tell you which install belongs to which click. Campaign data stays inside App Store Connect Analytics and is never handed to the installed app. There is no API that reads it back, and no SDK that surfaces it. If your question is did this specific person come from this specific invite, this is the wrong instrument — that job needs deferred deep linking and an SDK, and it belongs on a measurement platform.

That boundary is not a limitation of any link product. It is how the App Store is built, and it is the same for every tool that composes these parameters.

How do you keep campaigns separable?

One link is one set of parameters, so campaigns split in the console exactly as far as they split in your links. If a single link is published across a bio, a newsletter and a partner post, the console reports one campaign and you cannot decompose it afterwards — the parameters that would have separated them were never sent.

The practical shape is one link per campaign, or per creative where that is how you report, created before the campaign goes out rather than after. On AppIn you set the campaign on the link and the edge composes Apple’s ct with your pt on every click, alongside the Play referrer for the Android half of the same audience. Both stores get the parameters they read; neither reads the other’s.

Before the next campaign, the cheap check is a real tap on a real phone from the channel you are about to publish on. Everything above is downstream of a click that arrived — and the thresholds mean you will not find out for a day either way.