Tapstream Offers Deferred Deep Links to Enhance App User Acquisition

Tapstream is working to help developers with what it calls a “big blind spot” when it comes to user acquisition - no ability to do intent-based advertising across the ecosystem. Every user acquired is treated the same way once they launch the app for the first time, regardless of the ad or the creative they tapped on.

Mobile deep links come close to solving this problem: they are able to pass intent from an ad to the app, but only for re-engagement. The app has to already be present on the device in order for deep links to work.

Deep links are the mobile equivalent of web URLs: they take a visitor from an ad click on a mobile device to an exact location inside the app. This is useful if you’re advertising a specific product, upsell, or content piece within an app.

It’s especially powerful for apps that are mirrors of websites with large amounts of content, social information, or other complex sitemaps. With deep linking, a mobile web user can discover content via web search engines and then be taken to that exact content with the website’s app. Google’s App Indexing takes this even further by allowing websites to link directly from Google’s search engine results to their Android app.

But all of this is predicated on one assumption: that the user has the app installed.

If the app isn’t already on the user’s device, there’s nothing listening to the app intent or handling the registered URL. And simply kicking the user to the app store to download the app is a terrible user experience: when the user installs your app, when they finally open it, they won’t be sent to the deep link destination.

To help solve this problem, Tapstream is launching Deferred Deep Links, a service that provides deep links that work even for apps not yet installed. According to the company, these links work well with existing deep linking services, but go a step further and work beyond the App Store. This makes it possible to do intent-based advertising for apps on any mobile ad network.

From a developer standpoint, if you have an e-commerce app, it means you can show an ad for a red shoe, have the user install the app, and show them that same shoe the first time they open the app. If you’re advertising an event-booking app, your ad will lead to the exact event the user was looking for once they run the app. If you’re advertising a specific bonus for your game, users who come to your app from those ads will get offered the correct bonus when the app is opened for the first time.

The goal of Deferred Deep Links is to provide higher conversion rates, higher user engagement and higher ARPU and to do so on almost any mobile ad network.

When promoting their app, developers use Tapstream’s taps.io shortlinks as their ad destination URLs. When a visitor taps on one of these shortlinks, Tapstream records a snapshot of their shortlink session, including the ad’s source and their intended deep link destination.

Then, the taps.io redirect handler attempts to send the user to the deep link destination. If this fails, it means the app is not present on the user’s device; the user is then redirected to the app store but the actual deep link is stored on Tapstream servers.

Once the user installs and runs the app for the first time, the Tapstream SDK sends an installation event to the Tapstream event API. This tells the Tapstream attribution engine to find a mate for the SDK session among the pool of eligible shortlink sessions. When the attribution engine mates the shortlink session to the SDK session, Tapstream credits the shortlink with a conversion.

Now, back to the app. The Tapstream SDK allows the app developer to register for a callback that provides the app with the user’s entire context, including which campaign brought them to the app, what deep link was attached to it, and more. The app developer can now grab the intended deep link destination and move the user there.

Tapstream’s attribution engine makes conversion decisions in near-real time at scale, allowing the services to push the conversion data down to the SDK in time for the developer to meaningfully alter the user experience based on this data.

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