App launch growth: user awakening methods

01 Introduction

As a user, you must be thinking: "This is so convenient shopping. I don't even have to open Taobao to search for products myself." As an advertiser, you must be thinking: "I have attracted another user, and maybe it will even lead to a conversion." Users and advertisers had a great time and happily achieved ROI.

So, how do information apps wake up the Taobao App, and how does the Taobao App jump to the advertising page browsed by the user? The following section will explain to you the black technology involved: wake-up and scene restoration.

Wake-up & scene restoration, as a commonly used means of increasing activity in operations, is conducive to improving the activity of old users in the App. Scenario-based wake-up can better stimulate users' willingness to convert. It is applicable to the following marketing scenarios:

a) WeChat, QQ and other social software –> Target App

Nowadays, in order to achieve fission, all apps have a sharing function. User A shares the App content link to WeChat or QQ. After user B clicks on the link, user B will be guided to open or download the App, thereby attracting new users or activating user B.

b) SMS, email, push, etc. –> Target App

SMS, email, and push are also common operational marketing methods. When user A opens a promotional SMS, email, push, etc. of an App, the user will be guided to open or download the App.

c) Host App–>Target App

User A browses and clicks on the promotion of the target app on the host app, and the host app guides the user to open or download the app.

In short, any activity that needs to attract users to the target app will use wakeup and scene restoration.

02 DeepLink

When it comes to wake-up and scene restoration, we have to talk about DeepLink technology, because it is the basis for realizing wake-up and scene functions. Deeplink is divided into Deeplink and Deferred Deeplink. The "Deeplink" commonly mentioned in the industry is often a general term for the two.

Deeplink: Deep link means that when the target App is already installed, the host App passes specific parameters to the target App in the form of a URL, thereby directly opening the specified internal page in the target App, realizing a direct jump from the link to the internal page of the App.

Deferred Deeplink: Deferred deep link is different from ordinary deep link. It mainly adds a judgment whether the target app has been installed. When the user clicks the link, if the app is not installed, the user is guided to the application market. After downloading the corresponding app, the user will automatically jump to the specified internal page when opening the app for the first time.

03Wake -up method

Currently, the commonly used App wake-up methods include the following: Url Scheme, Universal Link, and App Link.

UrlScheme

After the user clicks the scheme link, if the target App is installed, the target App is called through parameters and the specified page is opened. If the App is not installed, there is no response after clicking the link. Through the Url Scheme method, the App needs to be able to receive parameters and pass them to the App.

Since Scheme has a problem of no response when clicking on the link when the App is not installed, double links are generally selected during delivery, that is, Scheme+H5. When the wake-up fails, the H5 page can be opened.

When waking up the App through Scheme, it is generally necessary to first determine whether the user has installed the target App. Regarding whether an app has been installed, Android can determine by the app package name, while IOS can only determine 40 apps (system level, the change list requires a release). This is why the advertising platform provides installed App user targeting support for Android, which can be detected on the App side by sending a package name list.

When determining whether an App has been installed, if it can be clearly determined that the App has been installed, directly use the Scheme to wake it up; if it is not possible to determine whether the current device has installed the target App, use the scheme to wake it up first and set a countdown to monitor whether the target App has been woken up before the countdown ends. A common monitoring method is to determine whether the current page is visible.

Universal Link

Universal link is a universal link technology launched by Apple. If the target App supports Universal link, you can open the specified page in the target App by accessing the http/https link; if the App is not installed, you can jump to the custom web page, which solves the defect that Scheme is unresponsive when the App is not installed. However, it is only available on IOS (version 9.0 and above). On Android, the corresponding H5 page will be opened. For example: https://dp.ctrip.com.

Since Universal Link can only wake up the App on iOS, if you need to use Universal Link during delivery, you need to do system targeting and only target iOS users.

App Link

App link is a link technology launched by Android (version 6.0 and above), and its function is similar to Universal link of IOS. If you use App link for delivery, you also need to select system targeting.

04Scene restoration

Scene restoration mainly solves the problem of how to open the specified page in the App after downloading, installing and activating it when the user has not installed the target App. Compared with traditional wake-up, the difficulty lies mainly in how the newly downloaded and activated App obtains the link content when the host App is clicked.

At present, conventional information transmission methods mainly include monitoring links and clipboard solutions.

Monitoring Links

When the user clicks the wake-up button, the user's device number information and click content are returned through the monitoring link. After the user downloads, installs and activates the app, the device number can be used to match the click content in the host App to determine which corresponding page the user should be directed to. Currently, mainstream advertising platforms support replacing the landing page macros in monitoring links when reporting monitoring data. In addition to the landing page macro, you can also obtain mapping relationships through other macros, such as advertising ID/creative ID, etc. This requires maintaining the relationship between macro parameters and landing pages.

This solution relies on the advertising platform to support corresponding macro replacement, which is triggered when the user sees or clicks on the ad creative (outermost layer). If the delivered content is an aggregate page, the user's operations on the aggregate page cannot be provided by the platform, and can only be restored by relying on the advertiser's technology.

Clipboard

When it comes to scene restoration through monitoring links, if the content delivered is an aggregation page scene and the scene restoration cannot be completed well, then advertisers can use the clipboard function to achieve content scene restoration in the aggregation page.

When a user interacts on an aggregation page, since the aggregation page is built by the advertiser himself, he can embed his own JS-SDK for collecting data. The main function of this SDK is to collect the user's interactive behavior on the current page and then report the data. In this way, when the user downloads and activates the app, the data can be used to restore the scene and open the corresponding page.

Best Practices

05 Conclusion

In fact, the technical solution of scene restoration is similar to the attribution solution described in " App Delivery Growth : Introduction to Attribution Model and Framework", and readers can learn from each other. The core of all of them is to obtain and record the user behavior before the conversion occurs. The conversion of scene restoration is the first time the user opens the App, and the attribution model used is the Last Model logic.

Author: Baozi

Official Account: Daily Diary of Commercialized Products