deeplinkme

[deeplinkme]

Hi there, I’m the new Deeplink launcher page!!

Dear Deeplink’rs,

Since iOS9 released last September, you’ve had to suffer through a less-than-ideal Safari launcher flow, where your existing users were sent into the app after a simple dialogue box, but the folks that didn’t have your app had to see an ugly failure message without much clarity on how to proceed.

As you know, we’re wholly and totally dedicated to optimizing the deep linking experience and making sure the links flow as seamlessly as possible into the app. So we’re super excited to show you our brand new Deeplink launcher. 

Here’s a peek:

That “Just tap here” thing shows regardless of whether or not the app is installed and makes it abundantly clear what your users should do. YAY!!!

So, since this released, we’ve gotten loads of questions. We figured a quick little Q&A might help you out. So here goes:

Q: What about Bob Android?

A: Android works the same. No dialogue, just super clean deep linking. The launcher looks pretty much the same, but no arrow or “just tap here.”

Q: Can I remove the Deeplink logo?

A: Totes. Our Pro users can turn this into a white-label solution easily and cleanly.

Q: What about the wording on that page? Can I use some custom text?

A: Of course. The room is limited but you can write whatever 30 characters you’d like!

Q: What if the user doesn’t have my app installed?

A: They’ll see a dialogue box saying the deep link failed, but they will also see the arrow and message telling them where to tap to continue in the process. BOOM!

Q: What do I have to do to rock this sweet, sweet launcher UI?

A: Not a thing! It’s live now. Here’s an example to try from your iPhone: http://deeplink.me/facebook.com

Q: Will this work from Facebook’s iOS app?

A: Yup!!

Q: Do you have a way to totally customize that page? Like WYSIWYG?

A: Stay tuned....   :)

Any other questions? Email one of our custom launcher specialists at hey@deeplink.me.

[deeplinkme]

Building A Stronger Deeplink Foundation

When you’re lucky enough to work on a pioneering and truly innovative product, it’s always tempting to push through to a future that others aren’t yet ready for.  On the one hand, we’re very proud to have been the first deep linking platform, the first to launch a searchable and scalable deeplink marketplace, and are still the largest indie deep linking platform.  

But on the other hand, while we’re excited to push the envelope toward what we believe is the future of mobile search, we also are lucky to have a great customer base of amazing apps, who want better deep linking tools and analytics to meet their needs now.

So we’ve been heads down the past few months, building a more robust core deep linking platform, with a stronger set of tools to enhance both the ease & ability to deep link into your app, and to make your app content findable and searchable. 

We’re excited to announce the launch of these upgraded tools today!

These include great new features, like;

- Deferred/Persistent Deep Linking

- iOS Spotlight Search Optimization

- Enhanced, per-link analytics

- AppWords Networking Tool

(our awesome new AppWords Networking tool!)

With much, much more to come!  Our free tier is still available, but we have now added Pro and Enterprise accounts to meet the growing needs of our valued and loyal customers.

As we build up AppWords, our vision for the future of mobile search, we felt the need to also build a stronger foundation for our core deep linking platform. This will enable us to build an even stronger and robust solution for the future of mobile search.  And we’re more excited than ever to be one of the leaders building this future.

Enjoy all the new tools and analytics!  Sign up and get started for free at deeplink.me

[deeplinkme]

Introducing Spotlight Optimization from AppWords

Image credit: Business Insider

With the release of iOS9, Spotlight immediately provided a massive boon for app developers and marketers. Gone were the days where the pages of your app remained passively undiscoverable, patiently waiting for existing users to accidentally realize that content existed. Core Spotlight finally allows you to actively put your content in front of your users, all while they are looking for it from an OS level.

This is great news!

But, as many marketers and observers are quickly realizing and noting, the first version of deep-linked Spotlight Search is very limited in scope. Because this is a new feature and because Apple doesn’t provide any intelligence around helping the most relevant content to surface, each app is tasked with building a comprehensive strategy around Spotlight and app search. That doesn’t seem scalable, or particularly helpful to users, or to us app marketers!

And that’s where we come in.

We’re sooo pumped to announce Spotlight Optimization, a easy-to-integrate tool that helps your content be found in iOS Spotlight search. This tool will be included in the next version of the AppWords SDK. At it’s core, Spotlight Optimization alleviates your need to pass info to the device, instead passing only relevant pages (on a per-user basis) to the Spotlight index on-the-fly. Now you can use that time to do other things that are more core to your business.

In short: We got you, boo...  (sorry about using that heavy technical mumbo-jumbo)

So what is this, really?

Who has the time to design, build, and manage an app search strategy? AppWords will be the brains for you, and decide which of your content pages are relevant to your users in real-time. Forget about serving your users pages that they have already seen (because that’s really just bookmarking, right?). Let your users experience all of the pages in your app, especially the ones that they haven’t seen yet.

How can you integrate?

For details, check out: https://www.deeplink.me/spotlightoptimization

To start the integration, check out: https://cocoapods.org/pods/AppWords  (about 5 minutes of dev work)

How much does it cost to use?

Spotlight Optimization was built as part of a more advanced deeplink.me platform feature set. All of our Pro and Enterprise partners get to free reign with Spotlight Optimization, so use it, love it, and tell us what we could do better.

No, we’re serious!

Aren’t you guys a deep linking company? Why did you build this?

Well sure, we’ve built some badass deep linking functionality (and there’s more coming). But our DNA is really that of a search company. And we’re also an app growth company. So <forced_modesty>we’re pretty good</forced_modesty> at crawling app pages, understanding content and context, and preemptively serving it up to users. Heck, we built a whole platform just on that premise!

So, now that Spotlight Search is here, why not help make it really sing? So that’s what we’ve done! And you get to reap the benefit!

Let us know if you have questions! We are here to help, and we love to hear ideas and thoughts on our products.

Hit us up.

[deeplinkme]

The Dream of Spotlight Search Is Still Unrealized (and here’s why)

It all seems so simple...

Type in a query, see relevant results. That was search, be it mobile or desktop. At this point, it’s taken for granted on desktop. It’s just there, and it works. (Thanks, Google!)

But for so long, pages inside iOS apps remained obfuscated behind a veil of functional passivity. Apps had tons content pages, but there were few ways for developers to put those undiscovered nuggets in front of their existing users’ eyes. As a result, apps were only as good as what the users’ already knew they could do.

Then came the big announcement. On a cool July afternoon in San Francisco, Craig Federighi proudly stood on stage and introduced to iOS users to their new best friend... Core Spotlight Search would finally unlock our ability to find content on our phone at the OS level, alleviating the need to manually search each app, or use a jenky Jerry-rigged third party solution to find relevant content.

This exciting new development was not only going to improve our ability to find content, but also make our mobile experience more powerful. We’d be more engaged with our apps, we’d have the ability to maximize each app’s potential, and save time and effort to get to content. The red carpet was being rolled out.

Again, it all seemed so simple!

Next came the documentation.

Apple had done us all a favor. Not only was this going to be a massive functional improvement. It was also super easy to implement! Just associate some meta data with your pages, and decide what you want to pass to the device index at any given time. Great. Simple, clean, very “Apple.”

Apps began to add the relevant code to their framework, and get ready for the Fall launch.

And then it launched... iOS9 was here, and all the sudden, the badge app icon showed 30, 40, 50 apps needing update (for those of us who toggle auto-update off, that is). For those of us who make our living in the app engagement space, it’s always enjoyable to check out the update notes when a new OS version launches. The notes talk about what the app now supports, and updates they’ve made (except Medium app, which is more a Slack chat transcript)...

If you’ve been watching those release release notes from September on through today, you’ve inevitably noticed that they all share a certain quality in common...

Here, take a look at a few examples:

            Notice a common theme?

RIGHT! Gold star for you... Apps are leveraging Spotlight to allow their users to search for content pages they have previously found inside the app. It’s a quick path back to a page you’ve already seen.

“But Google lets me find anything I want on the web!”

And therein lies the fallacy in comparing Spotlight Search to Google’s algorithmic search platform. Google made their bones by helping users find the best content from across the whole internet. It brings to mind an old quote from Eric Schmidt:

“When you use Google, do you get more than one answer? Of course you do. Well, that’s a bug. We have more bugs per second in the world. We should be able to give you the right answer just once. We should know what you meant. You should look for information. We should get it exactly right and we should give it to you in your language and we should never be wrong.”

Now I suspect Mr. Schmidt was employing a bit of hyperbole, as Google makes their money by showing a number of advertisers in a given search. But even still, the lesson is no less relevant. By design, Google is the layer of search intelligence and decision-making.

Their philosophy dictates to developers: you bring the content, and we’ll will crawl, index, and surface it based on relevance” (and maybe some other stuff). From day-1, Google theorized that making results incredibly relevant would bring users, which would bring advertisers, which would bring revenue (hindsight note: file that under N for “Nailed It”).

Apple’s world is totally different. They don’t need to worry about serving the best results. They needn’t build their search products as a conduit to new users, and they could give a hoot about search advertisers.

Apple has myriad products that force us to open our wallets, irrelevant of the ability (or lack thereof) to search for content. What they need is a serviceable user solution, one that allows apps to get some (any?) content results in front of users. And that’s what they’ve built. There’s no heavy search algorithms or predictive analytics, and no obvious data mining or machine learning to improving results over time. Whereas Google only needed content, and built the surfacing and optimization technology themselves, Apple is farming that out to the app developer.

Says Apple: You provide the content and then tell us what links each user should find.

So, long story short, there are inherent limitations with Spotlight Search, as it exists today. Most notably, any given app can only pass so much data to the index at any moment in time. This alleviates the need for the device to do heavy local result optimization, and keeps the search lean at runtime. And because the app now will need to decide what info should be found by each user, every app now needs to build a strategy around what content should be indexed, found, and served.

So, naturally, app dev teams (which are notoriously hamstrung by unmanageable backlogs and limited resources) are defaulting to showing what checks both the “easy” and “logical” boxes...

And thus the, when you break through the heavy press and shallow accolades, you realize the truth about the first production release....

Spotlight Search = Bookmarking.

So how to make it better?

You can’t...  (Debbie Downer)

OK, that’s not totally accurate. You can! But you’re going to be limited for now without some crazy internally product development initiative. What would make Spotlight Search better is a tool makes intelligent decisions (in real time) about what to send to the device index. It needs to understand what content is on a page, what the context of that entity is, how to get to it (which is thankfully becoming much easier as more apps integrate Universal Links), and have it organized in a simple and easily-accessible taxonomy.

In the web world, we know a congruous solutions as Search Engine Optimization, or SEO. The premise of SEO is to optimize the content and meta data of a web page to make it easier for Google to crawl, understand, and serve as search results. With Spotlight, the end goal is the same (serve the user the most relevant results), but the flow is unique, the signaling is totally different, and the technical necessity is wholly unrelated.

Traditional SEO requires an understanding of Google’s crawlers; what they look for, what data they value, and how to “massage” a site’s markup to make sure that those checklist items are hit. Google still does the actual crawling, indexing, and matching. Core Spotlight (as noted above) offers no layer of search intelligence or optimization, so the app framework must do the heavy lifting to pass to the device links that might be relevant for the user.

By comparison, imagine if Google’s documentation dictated to web developers that they should “tell us, each time a user goes to google.com, what content pages we should serve to that user.” We’d all still be using Yahoo! directories.

We need an optimization tool that can work within the Spotlight guidelines.

SEO for apps

Well, not exactly. It’s more Spotlight Optimization than Search Engine Optimization. The idea is, apps need a tool that will ingest and understand the content of the pages inside of it, and then use the vast amount of signalling that exists on each device to return relevant results. More specifically, this tool will replace an app’s “Spotlight Search Strategy.” Apps won’t have to decide to pass previously visited pages to the Spotlight index. Instead, all the app will need to do is toggle on the ability to be found in Spotlight searches. The Spotlight Optimization tool will do the rest.

Huge Opportunity

Every so often, the founding team at Deeplink looks back at the original Google AdWords Press Release. It never ceases to amaze us how beautiful the product is in it’s simplicity, and how the core offering hasn’t changed. Advertiser buys search term, and search term brings advertiser link.

In a world of disruption and innovation, AdWords still stands alone as one of the “I must do that” solutions for every company, regardless of size. And the beauty for the AdWords launch was that Google had a large channel for distribution already baked in, who were declaring their intents at any given moment.

Today, device-based dynamic search stands at a similar precipice (be it user-querying, or preemptive search and discovery models like our AppWords platform). Apple has us users raring to go and wanting more. Though their business model is different, the users are indeed primed. The ability to improve and smarten up the results is an immeasurable opportunity for whoever can crack it.

It all seems so simple!

[deeplinkme]

Deeplink Just Got Deeper (and way Linky-er) -- Announcing Persistent Deep Links

Image credit: Gadget360

By definition, app deep links allow developers and marketers to send their end users to specific pages inside the app. We’ve been at the forefront as thousands and thousands of apps have leveraged the Deeplink platform to easily drive retention and reengagement.

But continuously, our app partners have requested our assistance in improving their onboarding flow, and helping their newest customers find the content that helped drive the download. And as a team of product folks, who are we to say no (forever) to a necessary and relevant feature request?

Today, we are super excited to announce that Deeplink now supports Persistent Deep Linking!

At their core, Persistent Deep Links (also referred to deferred deep links) allow you to pass data through the app install process, so that you can identify where the install came from, and deep link  the user to the content they originally intended to see post-install.

As with all Deeplink initiatives, we’ve designed persistent deep linking to be super easy to use. It’s powered by the same SDK that you’re already using for AppWords and Spotlight Optimization. And since it’s built on CocoaPods, the version control should take care of most of the integration.

And furthermore, you’ll be able to attribute and measure all of the data in our portal (which has just been souped up like a car with nitrous boosters). We’ve been testing for a while and the product is pretty rock-solid. For existing Deeplink users, getting going is seamless and easy (be live in a few minutes).

It can’t get much easier than that! Let us know your questions, we’d love to help answer them!

[deeplinkme]

Get Ready: Deep Linking in iOS9

The leaves are changing, and the nights are getting cooler. That means that the iOS9 release is quickly approaching!

IS YOUR APP READY?

As you may remember from WWDC a few months ago, iOS9 is packed with new features, awesome functionality improvements, and upgrades to much of the core OS. For those of us in the deep linking world, there are a few that we’ve been particularly keen on. Most specifically, the new Core Spotlight APIs and Universal Links. Here is your crash-course on each, and how they will effect your existing Deeplink functionality.

Universal Links

This announcement was huge for app engagement! It means that web URLs will now open your app (no Safari interstitial) if your app supports Universal Links. We’re excited to announce that Deeplink fully supports Apple’s Universal Links. And if your app doesn’t support universal linking on rollout, that’s cool too, as we can still support deep linking in iOS 9 in a very similar fashion to how we do it today.

Core Spotlight API

This is the announcement that got much of the attention... Craig Federighi stood up on stage and talked about how broken mobile search is (Ahem!) and how signaling has changed (<cough>). And then he dropped the bomb. Spotlight Search will now search INSIDE your apps (duh!).

To make this magic work, you’ll need to support Apple’s Core Spotlight APIs. It’s super easy. Once you do, users can search your content with a query (sort of like Google search on desktop, but for app content).

But that still leaves a gaping hole in UX. Your app content is still only available when a user deems it the right time to find it. What about those times where a user does something complementary? Aren’t those perfect times to serve your app content to them?

They certainly are. So, we’ve added a crazy-awesome, incredibly simple solution to the AppWords SDK. With a simple 30-second CocoaPods integration, you’ll also get found in relevant apps from the Deeplink network.

Go here--> AppWords iOS SDK.  Do it now. 

No visual display in your apps, no updating necessary, just a free tool to get found in thousands of apps when iOS9 launches.

We’re here to help with all things iOS9 and Deep Linking, so let us know your questions!

[deeplinkme]

Introducing AppWords

We launched AppWords a few weeks ago, and the response has been overwhelmingly positive!  AppWords is the best ways for apps to connect with one another.  It enables apps to search for and display deep links that are complimentary to an action a user just took.  It also enables apps to drive traffic into their app from specific intents/actions that have just occurred.  (Read more about AppWords here: deeplink.me/appwords  ) 

AppWords is also employing a unique business model for linking out of your app: the Link Exchange!  For every two clicks out, you’ll be getting one back in.  Intent based, high quality traffic back into your app.  Pretty sweet.

Here’s the rundown of the AppWords launch coverage:

techcrunch.com/2015/03/24/deeplink-moves-into-google-territory-with-appwords-a-deep-link-mobile-search-and-ad-platform/

marketingland.com/deeplink-me-launches-appwords-a-deep-linking-ad-platform-for-complementary-apps-122470

venturebeat.com/2015/03/24/deeplink-launches-appwords-deep-link-bidding-platform/

sdtimes.com/deeplink-debuts-connective-appwords-platform-and-sdk/

http://readwrite.com/2015/03/24/deep-linking-search-appwords

We strongly believe that AppWords will play a significant role in the future of mobile search and in the app ecosystem overall.  As the majority of time on mobile is spent inside native apps (close to 90% now), the explicit keyword search is shifting from default to secondary behaviour.

Deeplink was the first self-service deep linking platform, and has grown into the world’s largest facilitator of organic deep linking.  But deep linking is growing up, an it’s shifting from simply moving users from point A to point B.  This next phase will be about smart, contextual connections and great user experiences.

I can think of no better company and team to lead the way into this next phase of deep linking: AppWords!

[deeplinkme]

Exit Points for your App

Your app is sacred... We all know that. But, spoiler alert: your users are going to leave at some point!

So how can you still make that process a positive UX, and also derive value from it? Here are our thoughts as posted on Wired's Insights blog.

[deeplinkme]

The Elusive Mobile Deep Linking Standard

The idea of a "universal deep link standard" is bound to comes up in any conversation about deep linking and the future of app engagement. It permeates the as-yet-unanswered questions about how the various platforms link together, and how all platforms will "play nicely" together to deliver value for the app developers and marketers. And it was something that Vera Tzoneva asked a lot about in December at a Deep Linking conference in NYC.

The problem is that the various issues that many note as arguments in favor of a standard are not relevant. It's one of the reasons why most of the startups in the space have shied way from trying to build a standard, and why the entities that have tried to push their own guidelines as standards have largely failed at doing so.

Will there ever be an accepted deep linking standard?

Nope. I don't buy it. There are lots of reasons why, but let's start with the reality that a standard would require all of the large players to work together, most notably the OS makers. It's not out of the realm of possibility that Google will be cooperative, as they will approach it as benevolent and good for all parties. Apple, on the other hand, is not known for cooperation or openness. They are a closed platform and a controlled environment.

And let's also not forget that though Android has been growing faster, iOS still owns the scale of developers. With so much money flowing through iOS apps, they have no real incentive to share a standard with Google and making it easier for Android developers to unlock some of that cash.

Don't Google's app indexing, Twitter Cards or Facebook's App Links qualify as standards?

No, they are actually more "guidelines" than they are standards. Each of these guidelines allows an app to get traffic from a specificdistribution source. More specifically:

Google App Indexing/Deep Linking: Allows for deep linking just from Google search results on Android from a few Android devices (Nexus was first, and some more recent versions also support this). If you've integrated Google's app indexing and your links are tapped from anywhere else on an Android device besides Google (or anywhere on an iOS device), this integration will not effect the flow.

Twitter Cards: One of the widest deep linking use cases today, Twitter Cards allow developers to deep link from a tweet of their content right into a page inside the app. However, integrating Twitter Card tags doesn't effect the UX from any other major platform, and it will not make all of your content links into deep links.

App Links: Facebook's open API for deep links is called App Links. Its functionality allows developers to drive app-to-app deep links by calling their API and essentially "asking" if that web URL has a corresponding app link in the App Links database. These links don't work anywhere else, and the solution offers no support for web-to-app deep links

Is there a massive need for a standard?

There would surely be benefit. An accepted standard would democratize the process of accepting deep links from all sources, and would certainly allow for a more seamless user experience across all environments. A standard wouldn't require separate support for each individual traffic source to maximize end-user benefit.

But let's be realistic. It's not likely to happen, and we should all accept that. But the smarter platforms (mainly the startups) are building their businesses to leverage all of the guidelines. Specifically, we've designed Deeplink to check the web markup and if the page hosts their app link in some way (Twitter Cards, App Links, Google), we will handle that and launch the app (if installed).

Hint: Test this by taking any Etsy URL and adding "deeplink.me/" to the front! Etsy is not a client, but we'll find the app URI in their App Link implementation and deep link the user from any starting point). Example:  deeplink.me/etsy.com/listing/221773496/cobweb-felted-scarf-wool-scarf-winter

There are a few app developers that host all of the guidelines above in their web markup, and if you view their source code, it's appears clunky and long, and the same data is repeated over and over again. But at the end of the day, if a site hosts their app URIs anywhere in their web source code, then we have all we need to launch the app from any starting point!

These guidelines all help developers structure the data in such a way that it's readable for a specific traffic source, but since each only works with it's own platform, they are definitively not standards.

Is an accepted standard a necessity for the deep linking ecosystem to take flight?

A standard is not a necessity for deep linking to take off and become commonplace and easy to leverage in many different ways. Though a standard would certainly make linking to content easier, our platform exists (and others do too) to help make app content accessible from organic and paid sources.

Looking past the idea of a standard, what's more important is that apps publish their app links somewhere, so the content can be accessed more readily and easily (though some smart startups have even figured out a way around that....  ahem).

[deeplinkme]

Our Five Favorite Productivity Tools for 2014

As 2014 draws to a close, we feel incredibly blessed to have a ridiculously awesome team, and thousands upon thousands of very cool apps using our platform (some in very clever ways) to drive engagement.

And being the humble startup that we are, we also like to consider from whence we came. We started with a few hundred apps using us, and now we've got some huge and heavy hitters using us to drive engagement, like UrbanOutfitters, Living Social, and Shazam.

But with only nine of us hamsters spinning the wheels from three different countries, its absolutely fair to call us a distributed team. So, how do nine folks in three distinctly different time zones keep up to date?

We took a step back and examined the five most effective tools we've leverage over the last 12 months to help improve productivity and cohesion...

Counting down, to the most vital.  :)

5)  Instapaper - Being a startup that sits in a very hot space, we are news-addicts. We consider it of paramount importance to keep abreast of changes in the app marketing landscape, so we are proactive in reading news about native app engagement and deep links. And that means that we each have "crap-loads" (it's an actual measurement, we swear it!) of stuff to read each day. That's where Instapaper comes in. We love how easy it is to store and sync articles from the browser, apps, Twitter (natively), bookmarklet, and even email as a last resort! It's a key tool for our team.

4)  Github - Sure, having a designer who sits far from the team COULD be a hassle. But its not, because, first off, our designer is better than your designer (no offense, yours is pretty awesome too!!). Second, we use Github. All of our projects are neatly organized in the repo, and we can share and commit version updates easily and seamlessly. We particularly love the desktop client.

3)  Trello - The organizer of all things... We maintain boards for all sorts of stuff, from product to crawling to special projects to BD and marketing. It allows us not only to organize, but also to prioritize and keep track. We're a better company for having started using Trello. Helpful Hint for Trello Teams: Add a "www.deeplink.me/" in front of any Trello URL to turn it into a deep link.

2)  Slack - This is our lifeblood. Much like Trello, from scrum channels to operations channels, and even one for just plain goofing off, we are HUGE Slack proponents. It allows the Tel Aviv team to leave notes for the NYC team, and vice versa, so that we all have a long queue of homework at all times (I think that's good?). Plain and simple, Slack makes inter-team communication a non-issue, and even allows for private 1-1 chats. It's a life-saver.

And as if those goodies weren't enough, their name provides us with hours of (often awkward) verbal fun.

1)  Refresh - Its hard to pick a #1 in a tight race... But in the end, Refresh won out. Because we all know that one's network goes a LONG way toward helping a startup succeed. Refresh puts our network at our fingertips, and helps us make the key connections. More than LinkedIn, FB, Twitter, or any other tools, we feel more connected to who we know because Refresh empowers those links. Our CEO was even interviewed about it for the Refresh blog!

There are so many out there that it really was hard to narrow it down too much (we had a hard time leaving out things like Zapier, iftt, Rapportive,and 1Password)!

I'm sure each team has their own to add to the list. What are your favorites?

[deeplinkme]

Top Mobile Marketing Predictions for 2015

2014 was good and all, but we're excited about a new year of progress in mobile, especially when it comes to app engagement and higher standards for user experience. Here are our top five predictions for 2015!

1. Installs become less important

It's already happening, but in 2015 we'll see the trend continue: app installs will be seen more as a first step than as a measure of success. More and more app marketers are realizing the importance of re-engaging their users. Driving people back into the app, whether it's to make a purchase or share content on social, keeps your brand relevant. And we already know how important it is to be one of the few apps a smartphone user opens more than a few times!

2. Deep linking becomes an essential mobile marketing tool

Mobile deep linking boosts in-app sales, which is one of several reasons it will really take off in 2015. Don't believe us? Take it from other folks like the bright minds over at Juniper Research. They singled out deep linking and app indexing as important tech trends to watch in the coming year. As a refresher, JackThreads saw a 21% rise in revenue per email after adding our deep links to its marketing pushes. 

3. Growth of location-based advertising

With iBeacons on the rise and a wealth of smartphone user's location data avaiable, it's no wonder that companies are increasingly using this information to drive sales. Expect to see more geo-targeting next year, from push notifications that notify you when you're near a retailer location to Twitter ads that use Foursquare's location analytics API to target users.

4. Mobile will take an even bigger slice of commerce

According to Criteo, mobile will soon account for 50 percent of ecommerce purchases. Expect even more growth in the longer term.

5. Mobile payments

How will mobile commerce take over purchases on the desktop? Mobile payments, of course. Apple Play, Google Wallet and other solutions remove the friction of entering your credit card info on your phone or tablet screen, which means less drop-off. 

[deeplinkme]

Threadflip's Anand Iyer on Mobile Commerce, User Retention and More

Customers (Not) in Cars and -- in this case -- (Not) Getting Coffee continues! I spoke to San Francisco-based Anand Iyer, CPO of fashion marketplace Threadflip. He generously took the time to share some insights on the industry, and given that we're still in the thick of holiday-shopping season, this discussion of mobile commerce is especially relevant. Enjoy!

How has Threadflip evolved since it started?

The first avatar of Threadflip was a peer-to-peer marketplace that was very web-driven. And we started to realize that when users want to sell primarily, it’s really hard for them to create a listing on the web. The most important part of the listing is photos, and getting the photos over to your computer becomes very cumbersome. So the question was how to evolve a peer-to-peer web marketplace into becoming a marketplace that’s primarily smartphone-driven.

We launched our iOS app around June of 2013, and since then it’s been very different story for us. Especially for a commerce marketplace, you want to have that distribution of items and a big assortment to select from, so [the app] led to more and more women out there realizing that they could create listings so easily with their smartphones. It became a good story.

The next big change was that we wanted to identify how users could sell better. My wife is a great use case… she would create listings for sale on Threadflip, but I would keep asking her why she didn’t list more items when clearly there were things in the closet she wanted to sell. And the answer would always come back as, “I’m too busy, I don’t have enough time.” And this started to resonate a lot with our users. So we decided to make it even easier for them and we opened the consignment side, which we call Full Service. You basically send us your items and we do all the work of selling them for you. 

You’re on Android and iOS. What differences do you see between the two platforms?

iOS is our big money maker, so to speak. The order is iOS, web and Android in terms of business growth. iOS is the primary, the web and mobile web are secondary and then Android is last. Our engineering team is more iOS driven, and we’ve been very careful and selective about what we bring to Android, mostly because we’re still learning about this market and trying to see how much of the demographic that resonates with Threadflip is on Android today. 

What is your strategy with push notifications? I’m always curious to hear how different apps balance driving re-engagement with not annoying users too much.

It’s a two-pronged approach. The first is when you sign up to sell something on Threadflip, you’re invested in making sure your items sell and you want to know what will happen with a listing moving forward. Threadflip isn’t intervening in any way; we’re just informing you of what happened with your item. The secondary approach is more along the lines of helping you figure out what works for you. These are marketing pushes, and they tend to help you find the thing that is suitable for where we are in the season, and we hope to make that more and more personalized. So if you love Tory Burch, we’ll help you find the perfect Tory Burch flats we know you’re looking for right now.

"There’s just so much pain that exists with having to type in your credit card."

With the latter category (marketing rather than transactional pushes), how often do you push to users?

It depends where you fall into the life cycle of buying and selling. For example, if you’ve bought something recently, we’re less likely to inform you of sales or new items. We haven’t figured out who you are just yet if you haven’t made that first purchase, so it really depends on the lifecycle of things, but on average it’s about one a day.

How have you been acquiring new users?

Given how the service has evolved, it’s been a lot of word of mouth and a lot of organic traffic. We’re really happy to see that, because these users are the most active. There are some referrals as well that come with organic traffic, with referral codes. We also dabble with paid advertising. We've tried Facebook a little bit to see where the demographic lives and see if we can find more prolific buyers and sellers. Facebook is where we started, but very recently we started looking at Twitter as well.

Several people I’ve talked to have told me that Facebook’s worked best for them, especially because you can get so granular with targeting and demographics.

Totally, I can see that. The product is also more mature, and the user base is huge. In our initial testing, we’re seeing that Twitter is also really good. We’re seeing really interesting numbers so far.

Since Threadflip’s a retail app, I have to ask your thoughts on mobile payment products from Apple and Google.

We’re working with Apple on Apple Pay, so we’re very bullish about that. We’re working to get that live. It makes a tremendous amount of sense for a user. It’s kind of like what Stripe tried to do for the web, where instead of entering your credit card information over and over again, you just confirm that you want to use a card that you’ve previously used on another site powered by Stripe.

"As long as the goal was met, there’s really no reason for us to be boasting about session time."

There’s just so much pain that exists with having to type in your credit card — it’s actually where we see a tremendous amount of drop-off in iOS, because users fumble with the credit card number or come in and go, “Oh, Threadflip is a cool service, but it’s too new for me to trust them with this information.” With Apple Pay, those problems go away because you’re not giving us your credit card number, and we’re still handling payment for you in a convenient way. 

Anything else you’re excited about when it comes to the future of mobile or advertising?

A lot of companies out there talk about their user retention a lot: "How many users come back and how much time do they spend in the app?" The way that we’re designing our product is really counterintuitive to that. We want users to come back, but what we’re optimizing for is actually how little time users spend in the app. Because that’s really an indication of the fact that you were able to find what you were looking for. As long as the goal was met, there’s really no reason for us to be boasting about session time.

More and more, you want to do something quickly while you’re waiting for an Uber, for example, and move on with your life. With Apple, one of the things we’re working on is interactive push notifications. If someone wants to buy an item, she can make an offer. The item’s listed for $120 but she’ll offer $100, and imagine if from the interactive push notification stream, you can say yes or no very quickly without having to even launch the app. That degrades our session time, but the user gets what they wanted and was able to move on. I think that’s a good thing because the user still wants the Threadflip app but doesn’t really need to open it because they’re doing these things quickly and on the go.

There’s talk about the future of apps moving away from the grid system toward what you’re describing here, and it definitely makes sense I think.

Yeah, obviously it’s different depending on the particular app and situation but interactive push is such a neat concept. The session time declining as long as the goal is being met is actually a good thing.

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THE DEEPLINK RECAP - DECEMBER 12TH

It’s been a big week for deep linking, and not just because we rocked Deeplink.nyc! Facebook and Google announced new ad products that promote app re-engagement, and some new stats make it clear that mobile commerce is on the rise. Read on for the full scoop!

Our deep linking timeline offers an overview of how mobile deep linking has evolved, complete with snazzy visuals!  

Google is introducing a new search engagement ad that will let you deep link into apps.

Twitter Ads announced tailored audiences for mobile apps; you'll be able to target users based on the actions they take in your app.

Deep linking makes the the cut for Juniper Research’s Top 10 Tech Trends for 2015 list!

Criteo’s latest State of Mobile Commerce report shows that sales on mobile devices are growing significantly.  

Also on the movie commerce front, Grow.co and Kahuna found that push notifications increase the conversion of cart abandoners by 42 percent. 

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The Deep Linking Timeline

Last night, we had the pleasure of speaking at the Deeplink.nyc event hosted by Eniac Ventures. Bright minds from Button, URX, Wildcard and Deeplink gave their perspectives on the future of mobile, and a panel discussion with Google's Vera Tzoneva was a great opportunity to hash through some important questions, from app indexing to the business and monetization side of mobile.

In addition to demoing our DeepSearch app, we used our 15 minutes of fame on-stage time to provide a top-level glance at how deep linking has evolved in the last few years. We hope you'll enjoy the timeline below!

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Deep Thoughts: Mobile is changing, but some things stay the same.

The ever-knowledgeable Benedict Evans recently wrote a State of the Union of sorts for the mobile ecosystem. There are plenty of good tidbits in here, but it gets especially interesting when he discusses the future of smartphone interaction. 

The problem, in his words: "On the web you can link to any arbitrary resource and on mobile you cannot - everything is inside silos."

Ergo, there’s a disconnect between the app environment and search results, not to mention the larger web. 

Most major players have recognized the shortcomings of the “walled garden” world of native apps and have made moves to address them. App indexing, which allows deep linked app content to show up alongside web pages in search results, is one major step. And deep links, of course, enable users to jump from the mobile web into an app without any snags.

Evans acknowledges the role that deep links and interactive notifications play in connecting the various silos of our smartphone experience. However, as an analyst of the industry at large rightly should be, he's more concerned with the bigger picture of how the various channels on our phones will be condensed for better user flow. And one possibility he mentions is pretty dang intriguing: Instead of receiving notifications on the app and home-screen level, what if we had one central messaging app or notifications panel that bundled everything together?!

Who’s to say how the mobile experience will look a year from now, let alone 10 years down the line? It’s an adventure, baby, and we’re down for the ride. But no matter how we consume app- and web-based content in the future, one thing remains certain: we need to get from content source to content source seamlessly. So long as you use different sites and apps to host your email, play your games and text your friends, you need smart, deep links to move you across all of them. It’s a means to an end, and an important end at that!

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Talking Shop with Sports Feed CEO Mike Wadhera

Welcome to our latest edition of Customers (Not) in Cars Getting Coffee! For the uninitiated, that's basically a fancy way of saying we're sitting down with our top clients to get some insights on the mobile space, app marketing and beyond. Noah spoke with Mike Wadhera of Sports Feed, and we're bringing you the highlights of that conversation below.

What was the impetus for Sports Feed?

I moved from San Francisco to New York and I realized the amount of sports that I was consuming was going up and up and up every week. I was a sports fan in college, but once I started my career I just didn’t have as many hours in the day to catch up with my sports world.

I called up 10 friends and asked them what they were using for following sports on their phones. The overwhelming response was consuming content through mobile-optimized sites. I thought that was really interesting because you have a very powerful device that knows your location and has a beautiful display, but it’s not personalized. If I’m not into hockey, I don’t want to see hockey-related content.

At the time I was a principal engineer at Oracle, and I kind of knew I wanted to do a startup next. The first version of the product was just an HTML website and it was really simple.

Did you have a grand vision of what it would become or was it more evolutionary?

The latter. We started getting a lot of user feedback, and one of the requests was to show scores. In the sports world, you want to know what’s happening in the front office and back office, as well as league-wide and team-specific stuff. But you also want to know what’s happening week by week in terms of games. We launched scores in June. You start off in a news feed, and we have a quick toggle that lets you go right into scores. You see the most recent game — it’s the same feed format where you’re scrolling through the content.

The exception of course is deep linking, when someone deep links into a piece of content.

Yeah, deep linking plays a big part, especially for sports. You have these units of content that are very specific to fans. If it’s team-specific news, it’s going right into the story specific to that team.

From the early days you were very analytical in your approach to user acquisition. What’s working really well for you on that front?

When we started out, one of the mistakes we made was thinking about it as a one-time thing; putting in the optimization, the “secret sauce”, and then we’ll just step back and that’s it. I think that’s the wrong approach in the App Store. For us, with sports, what people are searching for changes a lot throughout the year. A lot of our SEO actually changes month by month. About 70 to 80 percent of our inbound acquisition is coming through search.

That seems high compared to a lot of apps. It seems like a lot of apps are leveraging install networks.

Yeah, I think that now people are starting to optimize their ad spend around user acquisition. In the beginning we did a lot of stuff with Facebook. We ran a large-scale Facebook campaign in tandem with the [app] launch, and that drove somewhere around five to six thousand downloads. What we found with paid acquisition, though, is that the more you do it, the more expensive it gets.

Right, because you sort of tap out the group.

Exactly, and I think that’s something a lot of marketers who are transitioning to mobile may not go in for. These networks, especially on the mobile side, have gotten so efficient. With Facebook, it’s been very scaled. We could go up to five or six thousand downloads and stay in that one- to two-dollar range. I think a lot of that was a result of the targeting. We had creative for every single team and were running split tests between every team with two different ad formats for every team.

Changing speeds… Android users were clamoring for SportsFeed, and you gave it to them. How is that going so far, and do you foresee Android users surpassing iPhone users in the medium term?

We soft-launched on June 1st, ahead of the World Cup. The World Cup was our impetus for launching on Android with this timeframe, since so much of the international market is Android-based. There are a lot of sports apps on Android OS, and search on Android is very well done. We’re really looking forward to optimizing our Google Play listing. That coupled with the fact that we have an international audience on the Android platform could lead to it being larger than iOS.

As an app marketer, what do you see as the biggest hurdles?

A lot of the challenges are still the basics. Discovery is still really tough — if you have a new app coming out, getting discovered is challenging and getting in front of the right audience and the right user. Re-engagement is another one. Big solutions like deep linking provide a pretty natural way to bring users back in. Push notifications have helped us a lot, but I’m really looking forward to iterations of Deeplink and other re-engagement products.There are so many apps people have on their phone; there’s only so much real estate your app can take up. Now, especially with some of these newer announcements around location-aware features in iOS 8, that could actually work against smaller marketers and smaller players.

Finally, you have a bit of news to share today, right?

We're really excited to announce a major new update that we've internally dubbed "Sports Feed 2" on iOS today -- taking all of the learnings from launching in the App Store last year to inform a redesign that's incredibly fast, fun and beautiful. Along with a new optimized layout for larger displays, the addition of motion breathes life throughout the app: posts now "spring" as you scroll, photos "jump out" when tapped, and subtle transition animations combine together to ensure a responsive user experience. You can also now quickly access the latest scores and schedule from anywhere in iOS8 with the new Today widget, which deep links right back into your feed.

Download Sports Feed's new update in the App Store today. Congrats on the relaunch, and thanks for chatting, Mike! 

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How Twitter now tracks users' installed apps, and why you shouldn't care!

We've been banging the deep linking drum so loud for so long that we've gotten to know app marketing pretty well.  In the process, we've become experts in linking from app to app.  We even built an awesome search app as a demo of a form factor that app indexing and linking may take.

So we like to think of ourselves as soldiers on the front lines in the war for app usage.  As such, we absolutely get the different factors and parts, and know how they all fit together.  So when we saw the press (much of it negative) about how Twitter is now collecting a massive list of the apps on each of its user's phones, our team collectively raised an eyebrow, sighed, and then returned to eating our scones (gluten-free for some of us).

We then we took a step back, and thought it might be helpful for us to fill the audience in on how Twitter is accomplishing this, and what it all means for users, marketers, etc.

How It Works:

Native apps are a complex beast, especially in iOS.  Hey, we're not complaining, since It is why we exist (to provide linking cohesion in a world where none previously existed).

As we've built out our Marketplace, we've designed sophisticated tech that crawls into each app and learns how it's structured.  As such, we can tell our Beta developers the list of apps that exist on their user's phone too (note that this is crazy technology that few have created).  It seems that Twitter has done this too, limiting their data to just the top apps in the App Store/Play Store.

Why they've Done It:

More advertising $$$$$$$

Should You Feel Violated?

No.  In fact, we implore you not to buy the hype.  We make this request not in our own interest, but because this change is irrelevant.  Facebook is already doing this, Apple does this in iOS (you can see its fruits when you use Spotlight search), and Google has a fully supported API for just this specific purpose.  And here are a few things to keep in mind:

-  I love Zappos.  It's a great place to shop!  (stay with me here.  Like a great episode of Seinfeld, it will all come together in the end)...  And when I take a look at a pair of Pumas, I then see retargeting banner ads for the next few weeks.  I also see an ad tile on Facebook.  And thanks to search retargeting, I will see ads for some of my previous search terms in the weirdest of places.  Here's my meandering point...  Every web-based marketer knows everything about what websites you go to and what services you use...  Your hair products, your vacation destinations, shoe size, educational background, what car you drive, etc.  It's out there!

-  Facebook is a treasure trove of data.  Open Graph allows thousands upon thousands of apps to use your basic FB data in exchange for pumping more data into the system for FB to use as they see fit.  They know all of your apps (the ones you've downloaded from them, and the ones you haven't), what you do inside of them, and all the web pages you go to.

-  The only change that Twitter is announcing  us that they now know what apps exist on user's phones.  And while this is awesomely powerful data, it says nothing about what the users do inside of those apps!  Case in point:  I have the Groupon app on my phone, but I haven't opened it in over a year (going to delete it now, thanks for the reminder!).  At the end of the day, it hardly can be considered private or sensitive data that one downloads an app to their phone.  It's basically common knowledge now.  So, the secret's out, you have Tinder!  Deal with it.

Closing with Our Viewpoint:

Twitter is being smart and savvy.  This is data that is difficult to acquire and manage, but is absolutely useful.  They are not doing anything that crosses any line, and we commend them for being forthright about it (instead of using the data secretly, which they easily could have).  So kudos to Twitter.

Now, let's all get back to work!!