Delight customers by routing them to the content they expect.
Fixing broken links by deep linking with Branch increased the click-to-open rates for a customer’s app from 50% to 90%
Adobe Spark drove a 95% increase in conversions by deep linking with Branch
Learn moreLinking users to content within an app makes them 2x more likely to engage
http://yourstore.com
http://yourstore.com/yourproduct123
At Branch, our team spends every waking moment exclusively working on this, and we have learned that the devil is in the details.
Branch gives you peace of mind that your links will work in every edgecase to route users to the best destination with the industry’s highest matching accuracy, by combining every deep linking standard into a single, simple package. Easy to implement, and always up to date.
Traditional deep links route users to app content as long as the app is already installed when the link is opened.
Deferred deep links can route users to content even if the app is not installed when the link is opened. The link will first redirect to the App Store or Play Store to download the app, and then take the user to the specific “deferred” content immediately after first launch
Create fully customized links that match your brand, for improved conversion rates.
Handle all mobile linking standards and control the appearance of links in social feeds.
Know with 100% certainty which user converted from a deferred deep link, for sophisticated use cases such as auto-login.
Create links on all of your platforms, in all of the formats you need (mobile SDK, web SDK, API, dynamic long links, and marketing links).
Custom URI schemes were the original form of deep linking for mobile apps. They are like creating a “private internet” for your app, with links that look like myapp://path/to/content. The advantage of custom URI schemes is they are easy to set up and most apps already have one. The disadvantage is a user’s device only knows about this “private internet” if the corresponding app is already installed, and there is no graceful fallback option by default.
Apple introduced Universal Links in iOS 9 as a solution to the lack of graceful fallback functionality in custom URI scheme deep links. Universal Links are standard web links (http://mydomain.com) that point to both a web page and a piece of content inside an app. When a Universal Link is opened, iOS checks to see if any installed device is registered for that domain. If so, the app is launched immediately without ever loading the web page. If not, the web URL (which can be a simple redirect to the App Store) is loaded in Safari.
Google built App Links as the Android equivalent to iOS Universal Links, and they operate in a very similar way: a standard web link that points to both a web page and a piece of content inside an app. This results in a smoother user experience, but since custom URI schemes are still fully supported by every version of Android, App Links have seen very low adoption.
Alex Macintosh
Alex Potichnyj