Reddit Increases App Installs by 6.5x and Boosts 7-day Retention by 50% Using Branch-powered Cross Promotions

About Reddit

Reddit is home to thousands of communities, endless conversation, and authentic human connection. Millions of people come to Reddit every day to find experiences built around their interests, hobbies, and passions. Whether you’re into breaking news, sports, TV fan theories, or a never-ending stream of the internet’s cutest animals, there’s a community on Reddit for you.

In 2016, Reddit released its official mobile app on the App Store and Google Playstore. This has allowed users to continue to join discussions with millions of other Redditors, upvote content they want to see, share their own stories through images and articles, and discover thousands of Reddit communities directly in the palm of their hands.

Challenge

After launching its native mobile app, Reddit discovered that app users are generally more engaged and spend more time browsing Reddit communities and threads than mobile web users. With this in mind, Reddit began focusing on improving the app experience for their most loyal users with the goal of increasing user lifetime value. However, Reddit struggled to convert new app users, and limited attribution insights into which channels app installs were coming from made it difficult for Reddit to determine how to best drive mobile growth.

Reddit continued to evaluate its mobile strategy and began looking for a platform that could help them seamlessly drive users from various marketing channels, particularly from email, into the app.

That’s when they found Branch.

Solution

Reddit partnered with Branch to help provide a seamless experience for their users while ensuring complete visibility into their campaign performance. This means that Reddit now knows the channels app installs are coming from, how well various buttons drive installs, and how existing install buttons compare against new buttons Reddit is testing.

To drive app growth, Reddit integrated Branch’s deferred deep linking across multiple channels, with a focus on their web-to-app “xPromos” or cross-platform promotions. This allowed Reddit to preserve the context of users’ click-through-installs, bring users to the relevant in-app content, and provide users with a personalized app onboarding experience post-signup. Meanwhile, the reporting structure and Branch Dashboard helped the Reddit team measure and understand their cross-app promotion campaigns.

In addition to deferred deep linking via web-to-app campaigns, Branch also supports Reddit’s integration with Amazon SES. With this seamless integration, Reddit can easily implement deep links within email campaigns to bring users who click on email content directly to the app, improving the email-to-app experience.

Using Branch ultimately came down to three things: the Dashboard’s ease of use, the cost-effectiveness of simplifying their tech stack, and ensuring one consolidated source for attribution.

With Branch, Reddit is able to provide a seamless web-to-app user experience, uncover day-to-day insights and results through the Branch Dashboard, and accurately attribute results to each app campaign.

Reddit uses Branch deep links for their xPromo campaigns on their mobile site and in email campaigns to deep link users into the Reddit app. When a user clicks a Branch links, they taken to the App Store to download the app. The original click is preserved through install and the user is taken directly to the same piece of content inside the app.

Reddit xPromo campaigns using Branch deep links

Results

Over the past three years, Reddit has significantly grown its app channel. On average, it has increased app installs by 6.5x, and Branch-powered cross promotions have helped drive over 25% of app installs.

In regards to specific xPromo campaigns, Reddit saw a significant increase in engagement and retention vs. standard organic traffic. For any xPromo campaign powered by Branch deferred deep linking, Reddit generally sees a 25% increase in engagement and a 50% increase in retention. This shows that Reddit users who install the app from xPromo campaigns have more app opens compared to users who install from unattributed channels.

Reddit’s App Store top free iOS ranking has also improved from the Top 150 to Top 30 during this time.

“As we continue to invest in ways to bring more users to Reddit’s mobile apps, our integration with Branch has helped us identify the highest return channels and enabled dozens of experiments that unlocked mobile web-to-app cross-promotion. We look forward to deeper collaboration on our efforts with the Branch team.”