I think that's somewhat fair - but not totally true. Getting featured and getting some initial traction is really important - otherwise no one can find you...
That's fair, but when we built an app, it really became our life to promote it and drive traffic to it. Especially in the early days it's hard to focus on all the different channels - website, mobile app etc so you do start identifying with being an app developer.
I think it's interesting that they are making this decision - one that clearly pushed users to stay on the mobile web which is beneficial for Google - based on a study that was pretty flawed. This article debunks their methodology pretty well: https://medium.com/@alexaustin/just-because-it-s-google-does...
Thanks for the link, that's a nice critique. That said, much of their arguments don't apply here. The article take the publisher's ("businesses") perspective, but that's not consistent with a search engine in this case - the original study is more accurate from the perspective of optimizing for the search user.
The business wants to convert low-value mobile users into high-value app installers, and would happily sacrifice most to get a few installs if that's net positive on long-term value. The search engine, on the other hand, wants as many users as possible to be successful in finding what they're looking for. These perspectives are not aligned - high abandonment rates due to interstitials can be fine for the business, yet penalized as destinations from a search engine. The underlying question is who Google optimizes for in this case, the user or the destination.
Hi Eric, good points. But what about the case in which what a user is looking for is actually inside the app? More of mobile traffic is moving into apps - shouldn't we find ways to also index and show content as well?
I built an app without having a website before so I get the perspective of the app developer here too - trying to get people to their app. But I agree that interstitials is not the answer. We ended up building mobile app content previews (deepviews) for all the apps using our deeplinks (I work for Branch.io) which work much better.
Hi Charlie, yep. Right now we have three templates you can choose from, but they are all open source so you can create your own. Happy to help you with that if you contact us at support@branch.io
We started as app developers ourselves set to fix the problems we were facing building our own app, and the ability to surface content was our biggest challenge.
You’ve know the problem - generic interstitials that prohibit people from using the mobile website with the intention of driving an app install. A user clicks on a link and is taken to a full page advertisement for the app. It’s basically the worst.
Thousands of apps use Branch deep linking to route users to the right page after they install the app. We wanted to take this to the next level and give app developers the ability to route users to the right page before they install. What started out as a suggestion from a few developers in the Branch community has turned into a full-fledged product offering.
Branch Deepviews are previews of your native app content that are:
- dynamically created
- automatically formatted
- fully customizable
- desktop or mobile web compatible
Every Deepview comes loaded with a download call-to-action (CTA), powered by a deferred deep link, that will route users to the App Store and give them a personalized post-install experience. If a user already has the app, the Deepview will not be shown and the user will be taken directly to the content in the app after they click on the link. Moreover, because now every piece of content in your app has a webpage, we automatically add Apple Universal Link tags as well as Google App Indexing tags, Facebook AppLinks tags, making your app content discoverable.
No, actually our links work and deep link even if the app is not already installed. We build deep link that always work, using fingerprinting if we have never seen the user before. So basically any data you embed in the link becomes available after install. Here is how our links work: https://branch.io/links/
