The secret to successful deep linking: A mobile marketer’s guide

Deep links are an essential part of the app marketer’s toolkit. They’re the pathways that connect users from campaign to app, streamlining user experience and exposing users to the right marketing, and the right pages.

Deep linking has existed for some time, referring to the practice of sending users “deeper” into a website. Instead of linking directly to the homepage, marketers use deep linking to highlight the pages that work best in the context a user finds that link. For example, you want users to share songs from your music app, so you can add deep links that enable links to open the song straight away, instead of just opening the app.

Creating this capability is more complicated than you might think, and this guide aims to give you the rundown of exactly what deep links can do. Getting your deep linking right is incredibly worthwhile, as it will make your mobile campaigns that much more successful.

Let’s explain with an example.

You have an e-commerce app. You want to retarget users who’ve stopped using your app with an offer for items still in their basket, redirecting them back to the checkout page. You begin with a handful of channels, including banner ads, targeted email, and even redirects on a special page on your website, as shown below:

There are two kinds of links: default and deferred deep links.

Many MMPs advertise deep linking as proprietary technology. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Any developer or app marketer can create a deep link – just set up the link, integrate and test.

Beyond opening the app, Adjust deep linking offers additional benefits:

• The ability to redirect the user into the app store if the app is not installed on their device (deferred deep linking)
• Tracking of deep link activity
  These are two crucial functions that do require additional setup and support.

These are two crucial functions that do require additional setup and support.

Say you set up a campaign with myapp://blabla as the deep link (blabla stands in for a sophisticated parameter). If the app is not installed on the user’s device when they click on it, the user won’t go to the intended page.
A deep link solution like Adjust’s can reroute the user to the app store if the user is not taken to the app first.

So, if deep links are the mobile version of regular hyperlinks, allowing users to move between different mobile views and apps, where can they go? Here are a few examples:

There are two real benefits that deep links provide to mobile marketers: retention and retargeting.

Universal Links are a type of deep link that are exclusive to iOS, allowing iPhone and iPad users the ability to launch apps. Universal Links are standard web links that point to both a web page and a piece of content inside an app. A Universal Link could look like this: https://www.myapp.com/ulink/product?product_id=342

Deep links utilizing URI schemes go to a “Cannot Open Page” error
if the user does not have the app installed when the link is clicked. Apple’s Universal Links solve this problem. Universal links allow routing within the operating system as opposed to introducing JavaScript.

When a user taps a Universal Link, iOS sees if any installed device isregistered for that domain. If there’s a match, the app is launched immediately without loading the web page. If not, Safari loads
the web URL.

Adjust offers an effective solution that allows marketers to track deep links for existing users, defer deep links for new app users, conditionally redirect users to app stores, and more.

Adding deep links to Adjust campaigns

If you have deep links registered in your app and would like to use them while tracking user behavior and acquisition with Adjust, you can add the deep link to the “deep_link” parameter of your tracker URL:

https://app.adjust.com/abc123?deep_link=myapp://

For more on how to append parameters to your links, check out Adjust’s guide to tracker generation in the documentation here.

With this setup, if a user clicks a deep link and the app:

1. Keep track of your click-to-conversion rates

Drop-offs are a pain.

Your mobile app is where conversions happen. Criteo has found that consumers purchase at 3X the rate of the mobile web in a native app. Therefore, losing customers hurts in the long-run, especially when churn is preventable.

The way to get people to convert is deep linking. However, a poor setup can harm this user journey. If a user faces an error, they are very unlikely to take a step back to resume their journey, but rather bounce entirely.

So, track these drop-offs closely. Deep links are fiddly to set up, but if you don’t see smooth conversions, you’re potentially losing revenue.

For example, say you’re seeing less than half of your users who click a link making it to your landing page. Drop-offs could happen thanks to slow loading times, unintended clicks or a broken deep link.
The last should be a major concern.

The answer to any broken links is to test your setup to make sure that all links work before kicking off a campaign. A quick test could be the difference between high churn, or high conversion.

2. Be aware of bigger platforms

Apps such as Facebook and Instagram handle external links by loading the content in an internal webview. These views keep users within the app and require another level of complexity to route users off the platform onto your app. This situation can lead to loss of tracking, fudging critical metrics.

As a workaround, developers and marketers using legacy deep links on social platforms must build out methods that can handle edge cases. If you lack a unified approach to deep linking, the number of errors from edge cases becomes overwhelming, leading to frustrated developers and broken customer experiences that can be tremendously difficult to be repair.

3. Capitalize on your users wherever they are

Motivating audiences to engage in-app as opposed to on the mobile web is tough. Are dramatically more effective than the mobile web at driving conversions, so how do you get audiences to use your app if you don’t know where their next engagement point will be?

Below are a handful of examples of how you can capitalize on context and make the most of every audience touchpoint:

• Turn your mobile website into an app growth machine by capturing high-intent users who land on your mobile website via organic search with interstitials that prompt them to download the app (or open the app if it’s already installed), delivering them to the right in-app content at the right time.
• Maximize every email. Email is still one of the most effective channels out there, and 70% of emails are opened on mobile devices. The faster you move email recipients from inbox to native app, the more revenue you’ll drive.
• Create more opportunities with owned assets that are contextually friendly, in order to capitalize on cross-channel campaigns. Website real-estate can be dedicated almost entirely to pushing the users back to the app, especially when tied with real-time offers.

Deep links are at the crux of the mobile experience. As more platforms
and channels emerge – such as Voice, TV and Game Consoles – deep linking will develop in line to service these platforms’ ongoing interactions with each other. Even cars will be subject to deep linking technology.

Crucial to this is the ability to track between platforms. Adjust offers the ability to track across devices, and many other attribution providers have followed suit with their versions of the tool.

Contact us if you’d like to know more about our deep link solution, we’d be happy to help you learn.

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