Mobile Deep Linking Evolution

Mobile deep linking is the equivalent of specific URL’s on the Internet for the mobile apps via URI’s (uniform resource identifier). Just imagine directly opening friends profile page on your Android app for FB or opening a product page on Amazon app. As most of of our important online activities are getting “app’ified” the proliferation of mobile deep linking is quite natural.

For mobile marketers, it offers a lot of opportunities by the way of ability to directly reach the relevant app on your mobile to promote their subject. Offcourse some part of the monetary benefits boomerang to the app developers as well!!

Example URI’s (Mobile Deep Links) for some of the top apps looks like: eBay://launch?itm & twitter://

There are currently some complexities involved for the implementation of mobile deep links, however there is a Mobile industry body standardizing its use across mobile operating systems like Android and IOS, its called Mobiledeeplinking.org.

Not convinced? Okay take a look at these real life use cases:

Gaming App Promotions: You are promoting the sustenance of your game and a good strategy could be to promote the mobile deep link in social media which redirects to the next game level in the app. This will ensure that user remains engaged with your game.

E-commerce Promotions: As an ecommerce entrepreneur its important to drive your potential customers directly to the brink of buying from your mobile shopping app and this could be done using retargeting and then providing mobile deep links in your display ads that directly open the product features page from the app.

Utility apps: Suppose you have a currency conversion app that your are promoting, you can embed the mobile deep link to any currency figures on the business mobile sites, clicking on which directly opens up the currency arbitration on the app.

Some of the existing standards and tools that could be used by interested developers are :

Standards

• Omnilink Standard from URX
• AppURL from Quixey
• App Links from Facebook
• App Indexing from Google
• App Cards from Twitter

Non-standards

• MobileDeepLinking.org
• Deeplink.me

Tools

• URX

App developers can make use of these tools for faster user acquisition and their better audience engagement.