Industry
Retail
Users
50M+
A Fortune 100 retailer with more than 50 million app users had a problem that kept getting harder to ignore. Its legacy linking architecture couldn’t keep up with mobile growth: Broken links lingered for weeks, performance data grew harder to trust, and fix cycles stretched to a month. When leadership aligned on a broader technology investment, the team saw an opportunity to stop patching and start rebuilding.
Challenge: Legacy architecture slowed fixes and limited flexibility
Two years ago, the retailer realized it had outgrown its linking and attribution infrastructure. Even minor issues had significant downstream impact at this scale — a broken link could take three weeks to a month to resolve, and architectural constraints made it hard to respond quickly.
As mobile traffic kept growing and customer journeys got more complex, the gap between what the team needed and what the system could deliver became impossible to ignore.
A large investment across the technology organization created the opening to finally close that gap.
Solution: A rebuild that turned migration into momentum
Rather than patching what was broken, the team decided to migrate its linking architecture to a faster, more flexible foundation — and to do it in a way that kept disruption low from day one.
A lower-risk migration that kept the team in control
The team started with deep linking, which meant the migration didn’t require an immediate overhaul of the workflows and teams built around existing measurement tools. That deliberate sequencing gave them room to rearchitect thoughtfully rather than manage disruption across every team at once.
As one executive put it, “If you’re going to make the investment to switch, it creates its own momentum. Because you’re already investing to migrate, you can invest in making it a better ecosystem. That was the real opportunity for us.”
A partnership that felt like an extension of the team
Throughout sales, implementation, and scaling, the Branch team showed up consistently — same contacts, same cadence, same shared understanding of the business. The executive noted, “It doesn’t feel like a customer-vendor relationship. It feels like another team. Our weekly check-ins feel like a team meeting, and that consistency has really mattered.”
In an enterprise environment where progress often moves at the speed of trust, that kind of continuity isn’t a nice-to-have — it’s what makes complex migrations actually work.
A smarter owned-channel strategy to fuel measurable app growth
With a more reliable foundation in place, the team leaned into owned channels. Deep-linked smart banners, emails, and SMS texts became key drivers of both app acquisition and reengagement. Branch Banners alone drove roughly 20% of app downloads, a notable contribution for a retailer where paid search dominates overall acquisition volume.
The team also piped Branch data into its internal experimentation and analytics platforms, using Branch as a secondary source of truth alongside other systems. That integration enabled cleaner incrementality testing, strengthened attribution validation, and gave data and decision-making teams a more reliable signal to work from.
The results followed: The active customer base grew 4%–5% year over year, and app traffic surpassed desktop for the first time that December, the retailer’s peak season.
What’s next
The next frontier for retail is already taking shape: AI-driven discovery, agentic commerce, and acquisition surfaces that didn’t exist a few years ago. The team is focused on strengthening owned channels, continuing to experiment, and staying ahead of where customers are going.
The executive put it best, “As acquisition surfaces shift and commerce evolves, having a trusted partner gives us the flexibility to move with confidence.”
