Imagine this: a user clicks on your marketing campaign, downloads your application, and is then landed on a generic home screen without an idea of what they downloaded the app for. Confused, they close and uninstall the app in a matter of seconds. This situation is repeated millions of times each day in the mobile ecosystem at the expense of businesses in terms of lost income and development. Solution to this is to apply strategic deep linking practices that will make the user experiences seamless between the initial click and active engagement.
Deep linking has been a highly important technology to the success of mobile apps, which has been filling the void between marketing and user activation. You can guide users to a certain part of the content or functionality of your app instead of having a general landing page, thus providing a more personalized experience, which dramatically increases onboarding conversions. Learning about and applying different deep linking strategies can change the behavior of people interacting with your application at the first glance.
Deep linking is a technique of providing hyperlinks that immediately direct the users to certain destinations within a mobile application instead of just opening the home screen of that particular app. The technology produces a seamless transfer of external sources such as emails, social media posts or adverts directly to the corresponding in app content. The first strength is that the user context can be kept on the way, which makes the process of onboarding much less frictional.
Conventional application links tend to ruin the user experience as it requires people to scroll through several screens manually to locate preferred content. Deep linking does away with this wasted time by directing the users to where they require to be. The direct navigation turns out particularly useful in conversion optimization because each extra user journey step is another point of drop off.
There is a special problem with mobile marketing: when a user clicks on a deep link, but they do not have your app installed, what happens? Deferred deep linking solves this problem. This advanced method retains the destination one is supposed to hit and redirects users upon the installation process being completed. The technology is achieved by storing the parameters of links when a person clicks in the first time, after which this information is retrieved when the application is launched the first time.
This approach is indispensable to the acquisition initiatives when the prospective users first view your marketing material prior to downloading your application. To illustrate, when a person clicks on a promotional link of a particular product, deferred deep linking will make the user arrive on the same product page following the installation and not a welcome page. Such continuity would greatly enhance the conversion rates by fulfilling the promise that made the users show interest in the first place.
The tools of mobile measurement platforms are important in ensuring that the implementation of deferred deep linking is successful. These MMP tools trace user paths between devices and platforms, so attribution is precise in these cases, but still offer the seamless experience that deferred deep links offer.
Dynamic deep linking presents another level of personalization by adding personal parameters to customize the content according to user characteristics, behavior, and source of the campaign. As opposed to the static links, which are always connected to the same destination, dynamic deep linking provides the unique experience to various segments of the user population. This becomes flexible so that the marketer can create the most narrowly focused campaigns that appeal to the right audiences.
The technology ensures that you can send more than one parameter using a single link including user demographics, campaign identifiers, referral sources, and promotional codes. Upon reaching the destination, the app is able to recognize the user by this information to either personalize the interface or showcase the pertinent content or automatically apply the special offers. This high degree of personalization helps to greatly increase the user engagement at a critical stage of the onboarding process.
The basis of all deep link strategies is URL deep linking, which is navigating the user through the mobile application with the help of custom URL schemes. This is an intervention that must be well planned in your URL structure, so that the links that are created are effective and meaningful. The well conceived URL deep linking schemes are based on intuitive patterns which show the hierarchy of content in your app, which is easier to operate and scale.
When using URL deep linking, security is an issue that should be given particular consideration. Validating inbound links will ensure that malicious players cannot use your deep linked infrastructure to send people to dangerous sites. Further, appropriate handling of errors will give user-friendly feedback when links fail or when they point to non-available resources thus it will not lose the confidence of the user even in cases where the technology fails.
Another important element of effective implementation of URL deep linking is testing. Frequent validation of various devices, operating systems and scenarios can be used to detect the possible issues before they could affect actual users. This proactive solution will make certain that your deep link infrastructure stands up to conversion optimization activities.
To monitor the success of your deep link application strategies, you need to monitor certain measurements that will tell whether onboarding has been effective. The most straightforward measure of success is the conversion rates of link click to desired action. Other indicators of the effectiveness of deep linking in facilitating overall user engagement include the time to first meaningful interaction, user retention, and feature uptake trends.
The use of mobile measurement platforms allows conducting a detailed study of the contribution of various deep linking strategies to business goals. Based on these analytics tools, future optimization efforts are informed by identifying which campaigns, types of content and types of users react well to deep links strategies.
Deep linking is much more than a technical capability; it is a user first philosophy of mobile application design that puts experiences first rather than convenient implementation. Businesses can drastically decrease the onboarding friction and increase conversion rates by using deferred deep linking, dynamic deep linking and URL deep linking techniques in a strategic manner.
