WHY YOU SHOULD CARE ABOUT DEEP LINKING

Table of Content

Intro

Why You Should Care About Deep Linking

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Deep Linking Improving Every Step Towards Mobile Growth Success

The First StepAcquire New Users

The Second StepTurning Installs into Active Users

The Third StepRetain the Users You Already Have

Wrapping it All Up

Complete the Mobile Growth Cycle

Bonus Step: Email Re-engagment

Use Referrals for Virality and Growth

| branch.io

Intro

“

Just like most things in this world, Branch was born from a place of

desperation. We needed to solve a problem within our previous venture,

Kindred Prints, and found it was nearly impossible to link our customers

to any piece of content within our mobile app. So we decided to build this

functionality ourselves.

Since then, we’ve been helping marketers and developers across the

globe acquire app installs, segment engaging content, and retain users.

From the enterprise company down to the lone developer, we care

deeply about deep links and how they can impact your business. Mobile

marketing isn’t an instrument of the future, it’s a tool of the present.

We’ll share stats, tips, and insights in the following chapters of “Why You

Should Care About Deep Linking,” but our main goal is to reiterate how

Mobile is the most personal device we possess, which makes it the best device to market to. In addition, time spent in mobile apps has already surpassed time spent on desktop web, and for some parts of the world, mobile devices are the first and only computer people possess. -Forbes

important it is that deep linking has a place in your everyday thought-

process about mobile experiences.

Enjoy!

Alex Austin

Branch CEO

02

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Why You Should Care About Deep Linking

By now, you’ve all probably heard the stats about

how mobile is taking over the world. And let’s

be honest -- you may be pretty tired of hearing

that mobile searches now outnumber desktop

searches, or that there are more mobile devices on

this planet than toothbrushes. But the stats that

are really concerning discuss user behavior and

how, on average, you’re spending nearly five hours

per day staring at this little screen in your hands.

What’s more, is that 90% of that time is probably

in some sort of app. “That’s not me,” you calmy

whisper to yourself, as you look up and realize that

you’re reading this from your phone. Sigh.

While these stats may seem insignificant to you,

they are extremely important to two groups in

particular: mobile app developers and marketers.

Your entire business depends on users spending

time in apps. You’re the one vying for a phone’s

precious storage and screen space, flirting with

the incredibly fickle retention span of app users,

and battling it out among the millions of other

apps for your rightful place in the rankings.

And the truth is that marketers and mobile

developers are suffering. You’re suffering because

the market is completely saturated. Not only that,

all of the power rests in the hands of the largest

apps. You can see in the graph below that the

10th most popular app only has about 12% of the

adoption of the most popular. If we jump to the

1000th most popular app, that relative adoption

drops to about 0.2%.

This means even apps in the top 1000 are struggling to gain mass adoption, even though there

are 1.5 million other apps and over 56,000 new apps rolled out every month. It’s safe to

say that the mobile market is a tough market to break through.

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With about 99% of user engagement in the top

0.1%, developers and marketers are willing to

try anything to acquire an app download. Many

of them resort to paid installs, like those from

Facebook or Google, but the market saturation

has caused the cost-per-install to reach a point

that is entirely impossible for the vast majority

to keep up with.

| branch.io

Power Adoption Law for Mobile Apps

Skype, 10th Pixable, 1000th

Facebook, 1stRe

lativ

e Ad

optio

n to

Mos

t Pop

ular

App

1

0.5

0

Popularity Rank (Highest to Lowest)

1 0 0 3 0 0 5 0 0 7 0 0 9 0 02 0 0 4 0 0 6 0 0 8 0 0 1 0 0 0

In recent years, the cost-per-install has flattened

but remains so high that developers are

desperately searching for new, creative ways to

acquire new users and reduce the cost-per-install.

So, after countless hours of research spent into

user acquisition, what have mobile marketers

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and mobile developers started to turn to? Deep

linking. Deep linking provides the competitive

edge that marketers and developers have been

searching for all along.

| branch.io

Deep linking Improving Every Step Towards Mobile Growth Success

You’re probably first asking yourself, “What is

deep linking?” We’ll spare you the long technical

explanation but simply put: deep linking is the

ability to link to in-app content. Consider the web

for instance. Any link to a website other than the

homepage is a deep link. When clicked, they take

you directly to the content that you intended to

see. Deep links are what makes the web easy to

navigate. However, for mobile apps a number of

factors including platform linking standards, app

stores, and multiple device types and versions,

make this same type of navigation very difficult.

At Branch, we’ve set out to improve mobile

experiences by providing robust, easy-to-use deep

linking for mobile developers and marketers.

So, why is there an entire company devoted to

deep linking and what does it actually do for

mobile marketers and developers? It’s simple:

deep linking is a powerful tool to boost app

growth. However, when we say “app growth,” we

don’t just mean acquiring installs. Mobile growth

is a cyclical process that includes acquisition,

engagement, activation, retention, referrals,

and revenue, rather than just a sheer number

of installs. Sound familiar? That’s right -- the

same pirate metrics that measure the health of

a startup, made famous by Dave McClure, are

the ones that deep linking improves for mobile

businesses (Acquisition, Activation, Retention,

Referral, Revenue).

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The First StepAcquire New Users

By now, every serious app marketer has

experimented, with varied success, with paid

install ads. The temptation comes from the

promise of automatic app installs, but they

obviously come at a high cost. For teams with a

solid understanding of the lifetime value (LTV) of

their app users, paid install ads may be a good

option. For instance, an eCommerce app that

has an average LTV of $4.50, should be willing

to pay $3.50 per install. For the rest of us, paid

acquisition can quickly turn into a cost that our

business is not able to sustain.

It is important to note, however, that paid

channels have one additional benefit: they allow

you to attribute where your installs are coming

from. With this information you can allocate your

resources accordingly, focusing on the channels

that are most successful at acquiring users.

Luckily, deep linking allows marketers and

developers to accurately attribute their organic

installs as well. For instance, by attaching a feature,

campaign, or channel tag to the links that you

create, you’re able to measure clicks, installs, and

even in-app events data for all of your paid and

organic channels, like web to app installs.

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feature campaign channel stage tags

InstallsShow By: All | Branch

clear filters

200

100

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Mar Apr

30 228 31 329 1 4 5

EmailtwitterFacebooksms

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!

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In one example of an acquisition campaign,

Yummly and Instacart used deep links to create

an app to app affiliate program. Yummly users

who use the app for recipes, find a button that

says Shop for ingredients. Once tapped, if the

user already has Instacart installed, the Instacart

app opens and the recipe’s ingredients are

automatically added to the user’s shopping cart.

If the app isn’t installed, the user is first routed to

the appropriate app store to download the app,

before being routed to their shopping cart which

has been filled with those same ingredients. Deep

links make this possible by matching users who

Yummly and Instacart

used deep links for app

to app connections

clicked the link in Yummly to those who opened

the Instacart app.

Not only do deep links allow for a unique acquisition

channel, they allow Instacart to measure the

performance of their organic affiliate marketing

against their other organic and paid acquisition

channels. Once you can understand exactly

where all of your users are coming from, you can

customize their first experiences in your app to help

convert them into active users.

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VerizonVerizon

ingredients from a Yummly recipe get autopopulated in an Instacart shopping cart.

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As you look for new sources of installs for your app, deep linking opens the door to new sources of

installs beyond the regular channels like paid install ads. Three new sources of installs you should

consider are:

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Your website. Mobile app discovery is still in its infancy. Mobile apps are still discovered mainly

through word-of-mouth, the app store, and paid install ads. One source many marketers still don’t

think of is their mobile website. With deep links, you can build webpages for app content - called

Deepviews - and incorporate SEO for these pages. Once users discover those pages in search, you

can use Journeys to build experiences on the mobile web that take a user straight into the app and

land them on the same piece of content they were viewing on the mobile web.

Your influencers. There is no marketing tool more

powerful than your influencers. They use your app

like no one else and they love telling others about

your product. With deep linking, you can empower

them to do more, like sharing custom experiences

with their friends. Dating app, The League, used

deep linking to give an exclusive experience to their

influencers by creating unique invites with deep

links. These custom invites made it possible for the

influencers to invite a friend that could then skip

the waitlist and immediately use the app.

Your content for paid ads. Many app developers

think of their app as one entity. But what if the app

itself is not the entity, rather, just a shell around the

content that resides in your app? When you work

on install ads why not do something similar? Deep

links enable you to set up ads to specific pieces of

content and target categories of users interested

in that content. By using this strategy, HotelTonight

saw a 16% decrease in Cost Per Install and an 18%

increase in Install to Booking conversion rate.

link users to app content they want

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Based on our experience, user activation seems to be the most obvious

and immediate benefit of deep linking because it allows first-time users to

immediately view the content they were promised, resulting in a smooth

and seamless experience. It makes sense that they are more likely to

convert into active users. According to our data, there are three deep linking

features that effectively convert installs into active users with:

Personalized welcomes, otherwise know as custom

onboarding, is the process of showing a new user a unique

experience based on the information you already know

about them. For instance if an app requires me to login with

Facebook, and I invite my friend to the app via text message,

when he or she opens the app for the first time they may

see a welcome screen with my profile picture and name. This

custom welcome reminds the user why they were encouraged

to try the app in the first place, and provides social proof that

their friends are already using the app.

Gogobot, a travel app, used personalized welcomes described above to get a 78% increased

conversion to sign up, as compared to users who are greeted with a generic welcome screen.

Deep links provide the opportunity to attach any parameters you’d like to

the link, so the personalization options are endless.

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The Second StepTurning Installs into Active Users

1)

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BuzzFeed’s QuizChat uses personalized welcomes

to remind users who invited them

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Deep linked content sharing also increases the chances that a user will become

an active user. Content sharing is just as it sounds: a user chooses to share specific

in-app content with another person. This other person can either be a current app

user or new user. Typically, when a user taps a share button on a specific piece of

content, a share sheet will emerge, prompting them to select a distribution channel.

Depending on the app, the options often include text message, email, WhatsApp,

Facebook, Twitter, and a number of other social media or direct messaging platforms.

Once the channel is selected, a link will automatically be generated and the user is

routed to the channel of their choosing with the message ready to send. When the

user who receives that message taps on the link, they are then brought directly to

the piece of content in the app that was shared with them, regardless of whether or

not they already had the app installed.

Art buying and selling app, Vango, uses content sharing to discover users more

likely to engage with their app. Vango’s user-friendly content sharing abilities result

in users who are 2.5 times more likely to sign up. And the benefits don’t stop at

activation -- these new Vango users have twice the one-month retention of users

who didn’t arrive from a deep link.

Mobile deep links can automatically detect the platform a user is on and take

them to the right content for the right platform. If you are an eCommerce brand that

has a website that is not mobile optimized, have an iOS app, and no Android app, you

could create a link to a pair of shoes that works on every platform:

a) If they are on iOS and have the app - the app will open to the shoes

directly

b) If they are on iOS and don’t have the app - a mobile web preview of the

shoes with one button taking them to app store to get the app. Followed by

the app immediately opening for the first time to the shoes.

c) If they are on Android, the user is t taken to the website or the mobile

preview of the shoes

d) On desktop, they are taken to the shoes on your website

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2)

3)

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Close5 uses content sharing to

share items that are for sale in

the app, increasing the chance

of a purchase

The Third Step

Once activation is streamlined, growth efforts tend

to jump back to step one and re-focus all of their

attention on acquiring more installs. But remember

all of those active users who you worked so hard to

acquire and onboard? Don’t forget them.

Explaining the issues marketers and developers

face with user retention is as simple as explaining

why filling up a bucket with holes will never work.

Users (the water), will always find a way to leave

the bucket (your app), and you’ll never be able

to completely fill it up (enter any measure of app

success here).

With Vango, and many apps, users that come from

a deep link are more likely to become retentive

users. But that wasn’t just a one-time fluke.

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Retain the Users You Already Have

deep links to original content from wherever its shared

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In a random test across 150,000 app users on our platform, we found that retention doubles for users who arrive from a deep link. This includes 1-day, 7-day, and 30-day retention and deep links from every channel and feature:

Days since app install

Perc

enta

ge o

f use

rs a

ctiv

e ev

ery

day

1 2 3 4

30

20

10

0

Deep Link

Standard Link

Retention Rate by Download Link

Retention of users from a deep link vs. standard link

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| branch.io

One other mobile reengagement technique that many app marketers forget is email. While it’s been

around for years, it’s a re-engagement technique that is amplified by deep links. Instead of your email

links taking users to the mobile web, deep links automatically detect if a user has the app installed and

automatically open it to the deal, product or offer. We’ve seen this increase the number of session per

user by 65%, ultimately leading to increased revenue and engagement.

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Bonus Step: Email Re-engagment

Back to Mail

link users to app content they want

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Now that the holes in your bucket have been

plugged, it’s time to turn on the faucet and start

bringing on large quantities of new users. As

we’ve mentioned, only for the lucky few does this

mean increasing ad spend to watch the numbers

sustainably climb. For the many not-as-lucky,

we’re left scratching our heads trying generate

organic users.

Branch was initially built for mobile referrals,

because our founders saw firsthand how difficult

it was reaching the critical mass they need for

their previous company, a photobooking app. They

wanted to turn to referrals, which worked well

for web companies at the time like Dropbox and

Airbnb. They quickly discovered that robust referral

programs for mobile apps were nearly impossible

to build. Because of the app store, which makes

it impossible to pass referring data through the

app install process, users were left having to enter

clunky promo codes which completely ruined the

natural user flow.

With Branch’s matching technology, developers

Postmates uses referral

to encourage existing

users to share, and new

users to download

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Complete the Mobile Growth CycleUse Referrals for Virality and Growth

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Awareness

Activation Retention

Referrals

Because referrals are two sided, you can reward

both the existing user for sharing the app and

new users for installing the app, driving growth

from both sides of the process. The League

saw a 30% boost in total installs just by using

custom referrals that were mentioned earlier.

Additionally, the referred users are then twice as

engaged as normal users and therefore are much

more likely to refer others.

The mobile growth cycle

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finally have a way to pass referring parameters

into new installs and automatically welcome

new users with the rewards that they had been

promised. Picture this: a user clicks on a link

to receive $10 of free credit for downloading

the Postmates app and then that reward is

automatically applied without the user having

to find out how to enter a certain code. Pretty

seamless, right?

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Deep linking plays an important role in all of an app’s critical metrics.

If you’ve followed closely, you probably realized that the last “R” is

missing: revenue. Considering that the business models for apps vary so

significantly, this isn’t the place or time to discuss how deep linking can

impact various revenue streams. However, we can confidently point out

that deep links can decrease the cost-per-install on various marketing

campaigns and provide attribution insights on organic channels, which

allows marketers to fine-tune and reinvest that savings on further

growth techniques. When HotelTonight used deep links for their Google

ads, they were able to increase month-over-month revenue by 99% by

re-investing their savings into the campaign budget. If your app involves

in-app purchases, we’ve even written about how to use deep linking to

increase the conversion to purchase.

Although the benefits are obvious to those familiar with it, mobile

deep linking is still emerging. Having already powered over a billion

better experiences, users are beginning to expect these deep linked

interactions in their day-to-day mobile lives. Apps with broken, non-deep

linked experiences will quickly be discarded for those that bring users

efficiently to the content they are expecting to see.

For mobile developers and marketers, from companies large and small,

the time for deep linking is now.

Wrapping it All Up

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