What is a mobile linking platform (MLP)?
A mobile linking platform (MLP) is a platform that facilitates deep linking and attribution across non-paid marketing channels. MLPs enable seamless navigation within mobile apps, track user data, and attribute events to specific marketing campaigns. They provide comprehensive insights into mobile marketing investments, including owned and earned channels.
An MLP is a hosted platform that routes deep links to apps and provides a collaborative portal for creating, editing, and measuring performance of organic deep links. It provides a reliable and configurable linking solution for brands that want to ensure their deep links work while also providing insights into performance across marketing channels such as social media, email, search, smart banners, and QR codes. Ultimately, an MLP provides the tools to help companies drive acquisition, boost conversions, increase ROI, and understand the impact of every touchpoint across owned and earned channels. Using an MLP ensures that links work consistently and reliably to create a seamless user experience and capture accurate data.
How a mobile linking platform works
An MLP determines which linking experience to use for each visitor. Because link routing can get more complicated than routing based on data in link URLs, an MLP is able to gather relevant user data and determine the best possible user experience.
The data gathered by an MLP from deep links can be used in conjunction with SDKs to provide instructions to apps and websites about what content to display for users.
Benefits of a mobile linking platform
A significant benefit of an MLP is to deliver deep links that are easily deployed across marketing channels, even when users transition from one device to another. An MLP should also be able to handle edge cases so users get dependable deferred deep linking experiences across complex scenarios, even after an app install.
The primary goal of an MLP is to provide brands the tools to accurately attribute installs, opens, and down-funnel, in-app conversions for owned and earned channels. All of the attribution information should be accessible through comprehensive and flexible dashboard displays.
While many traditional mobile marketing standbys (e.g., paid ads) are getting more expensive and difficult due to changing privacy regulations, an MLP makes it easy to create and scale organic links via APIs, apps, dashboards, or Chrome extensions across use cases and channels without heavy technical lift.
Additionally, because an MLP should have the expertise to proactively develop solutions, there’s no need to rebuild linking strategies when Google and Apple announce major changes (e.g., IDFA deprecation, Private Relay, etc.).
Working with mobile measurement platforms
When working in combination with a mobile measurement platform (MMP), mobile marketers can also attribute paid channels, enabling unprecedented visibility into all mobile marketing investments.
