Being able to provide your customers with the best experience possible is a very important thing, especially in the ecommerce world. Doing so across platforms poses a challenge. Getting customers to the right place based on the platform they are currently on is an even bigger challenge but very beneficial if you can do it. Deeplinkr is a service that aims to accomplish that for companies that have both a web and native app presence. Deeplinkr uses deep links (also recently called app links) to accomplish this.
Deeplinkr is a platform that allows you to get your customers where they need be so that they have the best experience possible. A common case, espeically among e-commerce companies, is to have a web-based store and a native application. Say you send out a marketing email to your customers. According to statistics, around 65% of the emails you just sent out will be opened by people on mobile devices. Knowing that, would you rather be able to drop your customers directly into your optimized, native application, or put them on your website where they might fumble around a little because it's not streamlined for mobile use. The same thing goes if you're posting on social media which includes a large number of mobile users.
Creating a link
It all starts with a single link. This single link can take your customers in a number of directions including simply redirecting them onto your website, or dropping them into your iOS or Android app if you have one. If the customer doesn't have your native app installed, they will fall back to the website URL that you provide.
Lets pick a link to use. It so happens Etsy has deeplinking support built into their website. We'll use this link to a cool BMW M3 print that I purchased a little while back:
https://www.etsy.com/listing/94416200/classic-car-print-bmw-2002-turbo-m?ref=related-4
All we need to do is take the URL to this page and drop it into the URL field in the DeepLinkr link creator.
When we paste the link into the form, DeepLinkr crawls the linked page the see if it can find any meta information regarding deeplinks. As it turns out, Twitter and Facebook have done some heavy lifting for us already by establishing some standards for defining deeplinks for a given page. Applinks.org has all the documentation you need should you want to add these meta tags to your pages to make things a little easier.
If you dont have the meta tags implemented on your site, or you need some custom functionality, you can provide your own app handler URIs.
Tracking your links
Now that we have our link, we can send it out over email, social media, etc and we can track and see where people are coming from and what platforms them are on (browser, operating system, mobile device platform, etc).
You'll be able to see links as they come in over time and even break down visits to see which time of day people are clicking your links.
App attribution
Since we've just launched, we're still working on adding some features. One of those is being able to flag a link click as having been opened in the app. Everything up until this point can be done with very little to no development at all. This however will require some integration within your app to communicate back to the (future) DeepLinkr API and say "hey, this click actually opened the application".
With this type of integration, you'll be able to accurately determine if customers are more apt to convert when being dropped directly into your app or not. Or you'll be able to accurately track clicks from Facebook, Twitter, or Google ads. There is a lot of potential in this space, so jump on board with us and help us build a system that can help you and other businesses out there!