In response to industry-wide shifts toward mobile, several mobile marketing technology companies have joined forces to build a deeplinking specification and best practices guide.
“We realized it was common for our advertiser clients to be unclear on how to deeplink from mobile ads to apps,” says Jason Morse, VP of mobile product at Criteo, one of the leading companies behind this initiative. “We spoke with TapCommerce and ActionXand they were noticing the same thing so we decided to come together and address this issue.”
This mobile deeplinking project will provide a consistent source of documentation, sample code, and software development kits to help app publishers create seamless cross-media marketing campaigns and user experiences. Mobiledeeplinking.org will serve as the central location for developers to contribute to and access the mobile deeplinking support materials. Additionally, all source code is available on cloud-based open source management website Gitbub.com. The guide only supports the Android and iOS platforms for now, but will support Micrsoft Windows later this year, according to a release.
Deeplinking allows marketers to create direct links from advertising, email and other marketing content that link to specific actions or pages within a site, or in this case a mobile app. Through deeplinking a marketer can drive a retail customer, for example, to a specific product page within the brand’s retail app, or even to the shopping cart.
“For marketers that are new to mobile apps or looking to do performance advertising, this will allow them to accelerate their time to market and enhance their linking structure,” Criteo’s Morse explains. “We feel this will reduce the learning curve in the way app developers build apps from end to end.”
In addition to ActionX, Criteo, and TapCommerce, current contributors include Flurry and MoPub.
