Over the past few months, we’ve been working with many of you to see how you use the Branch Dashboard. Our navigational structure hasn’t changed since 2015 and we felt that it no longer represented the way you want to use Branch. Today, we’re delighted to share a new Dashboard that should be easier to navigate and far more logical – so you can build better mobile experiences, faster.
What’s Changed
Everything that you use on the Dashboard is still there – it might just be in a different place. We’ll walk through where features have moved one by one.
Front and center: Channels & Links
Branch provides solutions across every marketing channel that enable you to convert users in those channels to high-value app users. These are the tools you can use to improve your mobile growth strategy and grow your business, and these are the tools that should be easy to access. Our channel solutions – Web-to-App, Ads, Email, Referrals, and Quick Links – are now grouped together near the top of the sidebar:
Quick Links, the new “Marketing”
The link creation tool in the Dashboard is well loved and used by many of our partners. However, it’s not the only tool for marketers in the Dashboard – we provide web, email, and ad links at scale too. “Marketing Links” are links that someone without technical expertise can create in a few seconds, and still have them deep link into your app and look good on social media. These are now called Quick Links, and you can find them here:
Journeys Banners and Deepviews Previews are now under Web-to-App
Though we love our product names Journeys and Deepviews, they don’t always mean something to new customers. These are products that help you to convert users from the web into your app, and to optimize your web-to-app conversion rates by building personalized and innovative web experiences for your users. We’re now labeling these as Journeys Banners and Deepviews Previews, and we’re bucketing them under Web-to-App to give you an extra clue on what they provide:
Link Settings striking out on its own
We’ve found that Link Settings is one of our most popular pages – users like to see how their links are configured and what experience their users will have by default. Thematically, it also belongs with with the other “Channels & Links” pages, as it’s essentially for setting the default behavior for all of those kinds of links. We’ve given it a more prominent position:
Other changes
You’ll notice other changes, including:
- Toggling test mode and choosing your app are now at the top of the sidebar
- Sign out and external links (Developer Docs, Support, Get a Free T-Shirt) are now in the top right corner of the Dashboard
- One-time setup and testing tools are now bucketed together in “Setup & Testing”, including Data Integrations and Webhooks under Data Import & Export, and app-level and user-level settings in Account Settings
- Sources and Content are now visible in the sidebar under “Cross-Channel Analytics”
- Influencers are now more visible in Referrals under the Analytics tab
Why a New Dashboard Navigation?
As mobile growth strategies have changed over the last few years, Branch has matured right along with them or created the technologies to drive that innovation. The core philosophy behind the Branch product is that you should use it everywhere, across every channel where you plan on touching your users, from optimizing your web-to-app conversion funnels by building Journeys, deep link email campaigns, analyze cross-channel performance, create quick links to share on social, and more. Many of you who have been with Branch for more than a few months have evolved to the point of building more than ten different features on the platform, and we’re delighted to see that level of dedication.
Unfortunately, the old navigational structure didn’t properly represent this cross-channel and multi-use philosophy. Instead of optimizing navigation to enable those workflows, the Dashboard sidebar has simply gotten longer and longer with random feature appendages as Branch has grown. Branch has built products to help you create unified mobile experiences and measurement, but those products have not always been easy to find. After research, testing, and feedback from our customers, we’ve rebuilt this from the ground up.
Check it out here. If you have trouble finding anything or want to share feedback, don’t hesitate to reach out to us.