Ariel Zambelich/Wired
They were a discussion topic on Google’s Earnings Call and were a focus at I/O. Facebook created a standalone initiative called App Links to take a leadership position. Long time internet watcher John Battelle claims the quickening is nigh. What is it about deep links that has everyone so worked up?
Today, they help us quickly navigate to specific places in our favorite apps. For example, deep links enable you to click on a push notification that takes you directly to a calendar invite for your upcoming meeting. Deep links also provides the connective tissue between apps and allow you to click on an Uber button inside the United app to book a car.
For Google, Twitter and Facebook, deep links provide the infrastructure to unlock the next stage of mobile ad dollars. Mobile app install ads have become a huge business, and the next step is driving users back into apps they already have, either through an ad in your feed or from a search result. User retargeting is already a huge business online and is starting to gather momentum in mobile.
While these improvements to mobile experience are great, they pale in comparison to the impact of deep links on mobile search and discovery.
Its hard to believe that 6 years later we are still browsing through lists in the App Stores to find apps. And when we search, we get a list of apps that might help us with a picture and brief description, not a link to solve our specific problem. Web search is light years ahead of app search, and until we solve it long tail discovery is virtually impossible.
Deep links help us understand the content inside apps so we can categorize them in a smart way. Google and other mobile search startups are now indexing apps, like the Googlebot that crawls the web. They’re building search engines that understand what apps can do and are combining them with important mobile signals (e.g. do I have the app installed already?) to provide relevant and personalized results that link directly to the correct place to take action.
Deep links will transform how we search apps on our devices. But what about discovery?
On the web we share links with friends on social media, hyperlink relevant articles in blogs (I’ve already done it twice here), or personalize our homepage with feeds from our favorite sites. We don’t think about it, we just copy and paste the URL or hit the share button. Coming soon to the app ecosystem courtesy of deep links.
And, like it or not, advertising also plays a huge role in discovery. Yet all we are discovering today inside mobile apps are new social games, or seeing ads for companies our friends liked in the past. There is no concept of contextual relevance – the ad networks don’t know anything about the app you are currently using. You could be reading about a music concert, a football game, or politics and you’ll still be served the same ad. Online, we can automatically scrape the html of a page to know what its about and then can target an ad appropriately. So as we understand the content inside apps, ads will be become more effective for advertisers, higher paying for developers, and far less annoying for users.
Ultimately, deep links provide the underlying infrastructure that will bring many of the awesome benefits we take for granted on the web to the app ecosystem.
Mike Fyall is head of marketing at the deep link search engine URX.
No comments:
Post a Comment