When we released Journeys last year, we did so with the aim of making it easier for marketers to optimize their mobile websites for app growth and engagement. We made it simple to build audiences, customize creative, and run A/B tests, and our customers used these features to great effect, turning their websites into effective app marketing channels. The results spoke, and continue to speak, for themselves: companies like Bukalapak used Journeys to quickly iterate on web-to-app strategies and ultimately drive massive increases in total app installs and in-app purchase rates.
Still, one thing that has become abundantly clear over the past year is that Journeys users can never have too much control—over the audiences they build, the creatives they design, and the logic they use to display Journeys. Our customers asked for more, and we listened.
As a result, we’ve released a whole host of advanced controls to help our customers fine-tune their Journeys. I’d like to introduce you to several of these controls:
Deep link data targeting
Have you ever wanted to use Journeys’ audience rules to target users viewing certain types of pages on your website, but not been able to figure out how? Fret not, because deep link data targeting offers a solution.
We’ve added a new audience rule to Journeys that lets you target webpages containing certain metatags. This provides Journeys customers with a flexible new way to build audiences, and is particularly useful for targeting different web page categories. Get started by adding metatags to your website and using the “Is viewing a page with hosted deeplink data key” audience filter in Journeys.
Closing Journeys programmatically
Looking for a way to close a Journey automatically, without waiting for a user to tap the “dismiss” button? This feature should do the trick. Use this new option to close your Journeys after a certain amount of time, after a user has scrolled part of the way down the page, or any other time; just make the following call using the Branch web SDK:
‘branch.closeJourney(function(err) { console.log(err); });’
Block Journeys from showing
If you want to go one step further and block any Journeys from showing on a particular page, use this control. Just set ‘no_journey’ to ‘true’ when you’re initializing the Branch web SDK.
Automatically trigger a Journey to show
If, on the other hand, you want to force a Journey to show, use this control. Trigger the Journey by making the following call using the Branch web SDK:
‘branch.track('pageview');’
Disable animations
By default, Journeys appear on the page with a quick animation; for example, a Journeys banner might swoop down from the top of the page before coming to rest in its final position. If you’d like to disable these animations from running, this is the control for you.
Disable animations to help provide a more seamless user experience on single-page web apps, or just to make sure that your Journeys are loading as quickly as possible. Just set ‘disable_entry_animation’ and/or ‘disable_exit_animation’ to ‘true’ when you’re initializing the Branch web SDK or triggering a Journey to show.
Preserve/discard referring link data
By default, when a user lands on a page running Journeys after clicking on a Branch link, then any interaction with the Journey (click/install/re-open) will be attributed to the referring Branch link, rather than to the Journey itself. This can help you collect data on how the referring links are contributing to app growth/engagement, even when users aren’t installing from those links directly.
For example, if a user clicked a Branch link on Facebook, landed on your website, and installed from a Journey, this would allow you to attribute the install to the link on Facebook. If the original link was also configured to deep link into your app, that deep link would be preserved, too.
If, in these cases, you would prefer to attribute the install to the Journey rather than to the referring Branch link, set ‘make_new_link’ to ‘true’ when you’re initializing the Branch web SDK.
Listen for Journeys lifecycle events
Have you been looking for a way to measure—or hook off of—users’ interactions with your Journeys? Look no further. Branch lets you listen for Journeys-specific events like CTA clicks and Journeys dismissals, so you can measure the incidence of these events, or even trigger other actions when these events take place.
For example, if you wanted to send your users an email every time one of them dismissed one of your Journeys, you could listen for our ‘didCloseJourney’ event and use it as a hook.
With the help of these advanced controls, you can use Journeys to turn your website into an app engagement engine. Let us know what you think about these improvements, and drop us a line if you’d like us to build any other Journeys controls!