We often see dubious claims in the market where a company will claim to be the most popular tool for this or that, and we felt that it’d be important to clear the air on exactly who has the most adoption within the mobile linking category. Branch defines this category as any company that cares about attribution and deep linking, and has a native app in iOS or Android. This is most every category except gaming who don’t have the same deep linking needs as other verticals, and their attribution needs are much more simplistic.
Before you trust the claims, you should make sure you trust the data source. While assembling this report, we found that SDK tracking sites are out of date for most regions outside of the U.S. Here’s an example: In India, we found an error rate of roughly 50% accuracy (both false positive and false negative) on whether an SDK was installed based with our own internal tools.
We also found that Android app error rate, even in the U.S., was about 40% in false negatives. We hypothesize that this is mainly because these companies are selling most of their SAAS contracts to US-based companies and iOS users are largely considered the most valuable, so the competitive intelligence is most important to those focused on these two demographics.
The other important factor when validating these market penetration claims: quality is more important than quantity.
While we have tens of thousands of businesses using Branch, comparing a company at the scale of Pinterest or Twitter to a small, two-person startup doesn’t seem fair — and doesn’t maintain the integrity of the data used to make these claims. The top performing companies have extensive evaluation processes to ensure they pick the best platforms for growth, whereas smaller companies have a much less rigorous process for choosing a vendor and might not live another day.
For all of these reasons, we’ve restricted our analysis to focus on the top 200 apps who need both attribution and deep linking, limited to the U.S. App Store to ensure accuracy of our data. Using a smaller subset also allowed us to review the list manually to ensure accuracy. We found that the error rate was < 10% based on our own internal data.
You can see the results below.
As you can see, Branch is by far and away the most popular platform by a landslide. We’ve been around for less than half the length of the entire industry, but we’ve grown at a monumental rate to become the market leader in our space.
And it’s not just small startups. It’s the big enterprise companies that consumers know, love, and use Branch every single day.
Moreover the growth is tremendous. Branch introduced paid products a little more than a year and a half ago, allowing companies to purchase products such as Universal Ads for paid attribution, Journeys for web to app conversions, Universal Email and many more. The adoption has been incredible, with a ton of growth happening in 2018 from our entry into the paid attribution space. You can see the growth in the chart below.
Ultimately, we recommend that you be wary of claims of the most significant market share of this or that, and ensure that the data has been vetted. When using clean, accurate data that has been extensively groomed for accuracy, it’s clear that Branch’s growth has been explosive, and we’re just getting started.
Contact our sales team for a demo today, and see why the world’s top companies choose Branch.