About Boats Group
Founded in 1996, Boats Group operates the world’s leading online boating marketplaces with more than 200 million visitors across its three primary sites — Boat Trader (North America), YachtWorld (global), and Boats.com (global) — plus several European marketplaces. Together, these platforms list 200,000+ boats at a time and serve roughly 7,000 brokers, dealers, and OEMs in 140+ countries.
Challenge: Migrate mobile web users to the app
Boats Group launched its Boat Trader and YachtWorld apps in 2018 and 2019, creating the first boating marketplaces in the app space. Early results were strong: lead conversion was three times higher in the apps than on mobile websites.
Recently, Boats Group identified its largest growth opportunity: push even more mobile web users to the apps for stronger engagement. But its existing third-party vendor partnership presented several roadblocks:
- Clunky, custom, hard‑coded banners: One-size-fits-all banners were costly to build and maintain and slow to test.
- Limited experimentation: A/B testing required a heavy engineering lift.
- Unreliable deep and universal linking: Users lost their place when moving between web and app.
- Poor analytics: Without real-time tracking, the team couldn’t gauge the impact of more aggressive app promotion on lead volume or user retention.
Solution: A holistic, multi-pronged approach to drive growth
Starting with the Boat Trader app, Branch worked hand in hand with Boats Group to understand the user journey and design a more cohesive multi-channel linking and measurement strategy. Key components included:
Targeted Journeys banners with accurate tracking
Boats Group replaced hard-coded banners with Journeys mobile web-to-app smart banners that enable:
- Granular audience targeting based on user behavior (e.g., listings page vs. boat details page)
- Tailored creative and placement strategies by funnel stage
- Real‑time performance tracking and rapid iteration without developer bottlenecks
A/B testing to evaluate content, frequency, and placement
Using Branch’s out-of-the-box experimentation tools, Boats Group tested banner designs, CTA phrasing, placement, and timing. Results included:
- “Access Premium Listings in the App” outperformed more generic CTAs by 30%
- A single, relevant value proposition on the bottom‑sheet banner ( “Unlimited saved searches & saved boats”) drove a 20%–30% increase in view‑to‑install conversions
Deep and universal linking to preserve context
Branch’s deep linking and Universal Link capabilities ensures Boat Trader users land directly on the boat or listing they were viewing when moving from web to app. This helps eliminate friction, improve user experience, and reinforce trust.
QR codes and email to attract more users
Branch enables Boats Group to bring desktop users into the app through QR codes and lifecycle marketing. Email campaigns now feature Branch‑powered links and banners that deep link directly into the app, increasing app adoption across multiple touchpoints.
Paid media integration for even wider reach
Boats Group’s marketing team embeds Branch links into Google paid search and social ads. By passing app engagement data back into ad managers, they can better optimize campaigns and attribute installs to the right channels — all from the Branch Dashboard.
Centralized view via Branch Dashboard
Boats Group praises the Branch Dashboard for its clean, intuitive interface and easy-to-gather reporting. It allows the extended team to:
- Quickly access campaign performance without sifting through complex data
- Monitor both organic and paid initiatives in a single view
- Troubleshoot issues in real time and adjust campaigns on the fly
The result: less time wrangling data and more time refining strategies.
Results: Higher conversion + improved engagement = better business
Through strategic rollout, rigorous testing, and creative optimization, Boats Group saw measurable gains across key metrics — all without sacrificing user experience. The combination of targeted Journeys banners, deep linking, and centralized analytics drove more installs and higher-quality engagement in the app.
- App conversions: 20%–30% lift in view‑to‑install from mobile web-to-app ad campaigns
- Engagement: 23% lift in monthly active users (MAUs)
- App share and efficiency: 30% of total users are in the apps, generating 55%–60% of mobile leads
- Retention: More aggressive app promotion did not reduce customer retention
- Operational efficiency: Teams now use one dashboard for link governance, troubleshooting, and performance analysis
What’s next
Boats Group plans to expand on many of the validated tactics used on its Boat Trader app. The team continues to collaborate with Branch on deeper paid‑media integrations and explore new AI‑driven capabilities to boost MAUs and lead conversion. The company also recently relaunched the YachtWorld app using a similar strategy tailored to its target audience.