We live in an increasingly mobile world. As of December of last year, mobile usage beat desktop usage by nearly 10%, and that delta is only increasing.
Mobile apps have become dominant, and—as with time spent on mobile as a whole—continue to trend upward. It’s clear that users prefer the experience of native apps, spending 7x more time in-app, just as it’s clear that marketers prefer their consumers in-app, as users convert 3x more than they do on mobile-web and time spent in-app soars over time spent in the mobile web. In fact, apps accounted for 71% of mobile sales for retailers who invested in both mobile web and shopping apps in Q3 2017.
So why aren’t all mobile brands eradicating mobile web consumer activity in favor of in-app consumer engagement? Well, for starters, marketers struggle to acquire and engage high-quality app users for their mobile apps. With the increasing demand of paid install campaigns, user acquisition costs have soared, and fraud has become increasingly prevalent. This leaves advertisers searching for more cost-effective sources, with some even reverting back to traditional mediums like TV advertisements.
The lowest hanging fruit that marketers consistently leave unpicked is optimizing their organic channels and web-to-app conversion funnel. Typically, it’s a ‘setup iOS banners and forget it’ mentality that’s akin to setting up Facebook App Install campaigns with zero targeting, optimization, and measurement.
Notably, mobile industries across industries and around the world have become increasingly frustrated with standard banners’ inability to target web visitors reliably, to work across all browsers and OSes, to connect web and app attribution, to maintain seamless new-user experience, and to require complicated engineering to add customization. As it stands, the App Store and Google Play Store act as block boxes for cross-platform measurement because they don’t allow for attribution data to pass through the install process. This leaves marketers stuck, trying to match users after the fact, which is unreliable and often inaccurate.
This issue of ‘guesswork attribution’ only expands when considering the staggering fact that most mobile devices today can have up to six separate identities (for instance, Safari, Chrome, Facebook, Twitter, Gmail and your native app). Seasoned marketers know that creating seamless user experiences across browsers and devices while maintaining accurate cross-browser and cross-device attribution has historically been a major headache, if not a complete impossibility.
One way some of today’s leading mobile brands have simultaneously optimized their web-to-app mobile user flows without settling for subpar attribution models has been by working with Branch. By leveraging Branch’s web SDK, brands like The Knot has built targeted mobile smart banners and interstitials across Chrome, Safari, iOS, Android and even social mini-browsers (Facebook and Twitter, to name a few).
Using Journeys, The Knot is able to target their users with custom interstitials based off behavior, intent, and where the user is in their journey. Once the user installs the app, The Knot routes the user to the content they were viewing on mobile-web, allowing them to easily complete their intended action. Ultimately, The Knot has used Journeys to double conversion rates in two months, achieving app adoption goals months ahead of schedule. With further optimization, The Knot has achieved significant and sustained 35% app growth on iOS and 45% on Android in a short span of six months, all without increasing paid media support. Click here to learn more about The Knot’s mobile growth with Journeys.
By adopting a similar approach to your web-to-app user routing, you’ll be able to drive a significant lift in high-quality installs, while also tapping into Branch’s network of web cookies to device ID’s for unparalleled attribution. The days of guessing what your picture of web and app attribution looks like are long gone.