The digital marketing landscape is highly competitive. Every day, internet users come across approximately 4,000 to 10,000 ads, and while the actual awareness of these ads is low – often under 100 – there’s no doubt that capturing attention and driving meaningful engagement has never been more challenging.
The key is to grab the user’s attention straight off the bat, and then do everything in your power to keep their attention. That means minimizing the number of clicks they have to make to reach your landing page, and ensuring that their journey is as seamless as possible to avoid drop-offs.
If you’re advertising an in-app promotion or product, however, that can be difficult. With standard linking, a user who doesn’t yet own your app will only be taken to the app store listing, and after downloading and opening it, they’ll land on the default homepage instead of the content you intended.
Thankfully, this kind of linking limitation isn’t the only option, with thousands of companies now utilising deep linking to send users directly to the intended in-app content – even if the app isn’t yet installed.
Caution must be taken, however, to ensure the deeplink services you’re using are reliable and work specifically for the platform you’re looking to target and measure.
Let’s say you’re running an iOS app and looking to improve onboarding through targeted campaigns – how exactly do you implement deep links without creating friction for new users? How can you maintain context from the original click and ensure users land exactly where you want them to?
We’re going to look into all the most important steps below, helping you to create seamless user journeys that not only increase engagement, but maximize the overall performance of all your campaigns.
Choosing the Right Platform
It starts with choosing the right platform. When it comes to iOS deep linking, there are numerous tools and providers to choose from, but you’re looking for a platform that delivers those seamless user journeys without adding any complexity or technical friction on your end.
In our opinion, the best choice here would be Appsflyer, which offers a full suite of deep linking, attribution, and analytics tools specifically designed for iOS apps.
For those unaware, Appsflyer is one of the leading mobile marketing analytics and attribution platforms in the mobile app industry, helping users to track user acquisition, engagement, retention, revenue, and attribution across channels – from paid social and search to owned media and app referrals.
One of its core features – and the most relevant in the context of this article – is OneLink. This is a solution that understands where to direct a user regardless of whether an app is installed or not, routing them to the correct in-app content even after having to download it from the iOS store.
The reason it stands out above other linking solutions is mainly due to its ability to combine deferred and contextual deep linking into a single smart link, while automatically detecting the user’s platform, app status, and source campaign.
Whether you’re running paid social campaigns, email marketing, or influencer marketing, you’re looking for something that not only delivers users to the correct in-app destination, but also maintains the original campaign context – Appsflyer’s deep linking mechanisms use both iOS Universal Links and Android App Links, respectively – tracking attribution accurately and providing analytics that inform optimizing future campaigns.
Appsflyer’s OneLink technology makes sure of this, helping you to create seamless user journeys and gain actionable insights for every click, install, and in-app action that your campaign procures.
Implementing Deep Links Effectively
This is what Appsflyer’s solution can do for you – and because of its automation and intelligence, it drastically cuts down the work on your end. But there are still factors to think about if you want to make the most of it.
When it comes to implementing deep links effectively, it’s all about planning for the entire user journey, from the first click to in-app engagement.
The goal is to make the path from ad to action as frictionless as possible, so start by identifying the key destinations within your iOS app, and structure your links so users are sent exactly where you want them to go – and in a way that makes sense in the context of the ad itself.
It’s also critical to test across devices and platforms – especially with iOS, where updates to Safari, Universal Links, and app permissions can affect how links resolve. The last thing you want is to click on a link and end up lost in the app, so testing will ensure that your links behave consistently across different operating system versions.
Finally, it’s up to you to monitor and analyze performance. Deep linking is not just a routing mechanism, of course, it’s a tool for understanding user behavior. If you have decided to use Appsflyer, make sure you take advantage of their analytics and reporting capabilities, tracking how users respond to specific links, where they drop off, and which campaigns actually lead to conversions.
By implementing deep links with these principles in mind, you’re effectively supercharging your marketing campaigns, bolstering them not only from a user perspective, but from a data-driven performance standpoint too.