In the blog below, we will explore an MMP’s purpose, why you need one, and how to choose one that is right for your business.

What is an MMP?

An MMP — sometimes referred to as a mobile measurement platform or mobile measurement provider — is an attribution solution that collects and organizes mobile advertising data to deliver a unified view and powerful insights into your ad performance across media sources, publishers, and campaigns. MMPs provide an impartial and accurate overview of mobile ad attribution by indicating which ad source should receive credit for driving user behavior.

While MMPs offer deep linking and measurement for paid ads, they do differ from a mobile linking platform (MLP), which provides insight into performance across your non-paid marketing channels. While they both leverage the same deep linking technology and measurement tools, an MMP engages with complex ad networks that require deep links to work differently at times across many possible edge cases. For example, mobile measurement platforms have to contend with SKAN data and each of the numerous self-attributing networks (SANs). This requires them to prioritize fraud reduction and privacy compliance across each network.

MMPs employ a variety of technologies to track and attribute mobile events such as clicks, app installations, engagement, and revenue. The attribution performed by MMPs is typically done through a software development kit (SDK) or a server-to-server connection between your app and an MMP. Ultimately, the goal of an MMP is to help you understand ROI across your ad marketing campaigns and how to further optimize them.

Fun fact: “MMP” was the initial moniker from Meta for their “Mobile Measurement Partnership” program. Over time, “MMP” became an industry category that now includes all key mobile measurement and attribution solutions partners. 

The benefits of leveraging an MMP

Mobile marketers rely on their MMP because it makes them more effective. If you want to scale your app, ensure your data is correct, focus on the right users or channels, and know you’re not losing budget to fraud, an MMP will help you get organized. Leveraging an MMP will provide many impactful benefits.

All your data is available in one place

An MMP will provide all of your campaign data across multiple networks and campaigns in a single dashboard. Comparing campaign results becomes much easier, too. An MMP allows you to pull valuable insights so you know where to spend your budget and how to optimize your installs, ROAS, and LTV.

Reliable user-app interaction

An MMP provides sophisticated mechanisms to ensure users receive a seamless app experience when coming from your ad, regardless of their device or platform. An MMP will route users appropriately using deep links because, whether they’re installing your app for the first time or they open it every day, you want to ensure they each get to where they need to go.

Scale intelligently with accurate attribution

With real-time, accurate data at your fingertips, you won’t waste your time and money in the wrong places. An MMP will make sure you get accurate and unbiased data, even when the user’s path to conversion is complex.

Help with privacy policies and fraud protection

Protecting user privacy and combating fraud is now non-negotiable. This means you need to work with an MMP partner that understands and supports compliance efforts with dedicated resources and the technical infrastructure to support a rapidly changing aspect of the mobile industry.

Can I do mobile ad attribution without an MMP?

Anything is possible. However, few marketing teams are equipped with the time and resources to create, deploy, and maintain an in-house measurement platform without the use of a technical partner. You can try to capture attribution by cobbling together data from different platforms and hope for the best, but we don’t recommend going down this road. Some reasons why:

1. Mobile attribution and deep linking require a lot of technical expertise 

You will need a team of developers who are familiar with different types of mobile devices and operating systems. This includes knowing how to handle the different types of links that can be created and the data that can be captured, which is very complex. They would also need to constantly monitor the links and data to ensure they are performing correctly while troubleshooting any problems.

2. Broken experiences will negatively impact your performance

It can take weeks or even months to build an attribution and deep linking infrastructure from scratch. And, if you’re not careful, it can be easy to make mistakes. Unreliable deep links or misrouting a user can cause frustration for users that can impact brand loyalty or perception. Lack of accurate measurement or miscounting attribution can paint the wrong picture, impacting your decision-making and marketing ROI.

3. Processing and maintaining data requires significant resources 

You can easily spend a significant amount of budget and resources to build and maintain your own data and linking infrastructure. In addition, adapting to rapidly changing industry standards and privacy requirements can be a daunting task, even for the biggest brands. An MMP will work hard to take all the hassle out of it at a much lower resource or budget investment than if you were to go for it on your own.

4. You’ll miss out on unique access to SAN data

SANs typically hold back from sharing all their data with individual advertisers. However, they do provide additional, valuable data to validated MMPs. Without an MMP, you will have a limited ability to combine de-duplicated SAN data from across the different networks into a single view. MMPs de-duplicate attribution across your ad networks by cross-referencing event data, giving credit based on event timestamps to provide a holistic view of your cross-network ad campaigns. 

How to choose the right MMP for your app

There are many MMPs around. But you have to know what you are looking for when you introduce a new mobile measurement partner into your marketing tech stack. Not all MMPs are alike. Many cater specifically to the needs of gaming. Others, like Branch, are focused on addressing the needs of omnichannel brands that want to deliver seamless experiences to their users while gaining a big-picture view of attribution events.

When deciding on your MMP, you should think about your users, your marketing campaigns, and your advertising strategy. Here are some crucial things to consider when selecting an MMP:

Accurate attribution

Any MMP you consider needs to provide, at a minimum, attribution insights into clicks, installs, view-through, and other types of ad interactions across all campaigns, networks, and platforms. An MMP has to also support post-install event data such as in-app purchases, churn, LTV, and more. It is all about getting your data however you need it, finding results quickly, and optimizing your campaigns. 

Dependable link experiences

An MMP should offer a dependable and trusted deep linking infrastructure that reduces user drop-off with seamless deep linking for your ads. This, in turn, increases the chances of valuable user transactions. MMPs should also give you the ability to easily deploy and scale deep links that handle even the most complex edge cases. Whether it’s a click from TikTok on iOS, Instagram on Android, or any other combination, your deep links should just work.

Seamless integrations

MMPs must interface seamlessly with your data architecture as well as the data infrastructure of your marketing partners. MMPs enable an advertiser to integrate a single SDK into their mobile app rather than the advertiser integrating a new SDK for every ad network or publisher they want to run a campaign with.

Privacy compliance

Protecting user privacy is non-negotiable, and your MMP needs to put user privacy first. Leading mobile platforms continue to change their policies and regulations around ad tracking, privacy, and data sharing on a regular basis. We predict this trend will continue for many years to come. 

Fraud minimized at the source

An MMP that stops fraud at the source is critical to prevent a major impact on your analytics and budgets. MMPs should identify fake traffic and installs as well as click bots. 

The MMP you choose should make your life easier, not more complicated. 

Why should I choose the Branch MMP?

The Branch MMP is designed to meet the needs of sophisticated brands with complex, omnichannel customer relationships. By choosing Branch as your MMP partner, you can be confident you will get the most out of your paid advertising with reliable linking and accurate attribution across all your ad campaigns, networks, and channels. Branch is one of the most trusted MMPs in the entire mobile industry. Along with all the benefits we discussed above, you can also expect the following when partnering with Branch

A focus on accuracy and insights to make you more effective

Branch helps you measure things that were previously hard or impossible to measure. Our intense focus on accuracy helps you more effectively attribute installs, opens, and down-funnel, in-app conversions for your ads. Meanwhile, our powerful dashboard displays your performance with detailed, de-duplicated insights into ad conversions and campaign ROI. All of this rich data delivers insights that allow you to make your marketing more effective.

User engagement and onboarding that just works.

Getting users into your app is hard. Any friction in the app user journey lessens their chance of becoming a loyal app user. The Branch MMP delivers deep links that can be deployed reliably across all your ad campaigns and networks. We’ve worked hard to effectively and smoothly route users across use cases where they would typically disappear from view, such as when passing through the App Store or Play Store or in Facebook. The Branch platform also handles your unique edge cases. Users get a reliable deferred deep linking experience across complicated scenarios, even after install. 

Flexibility to put your data where you want it

Branch provides flexibility in how you collect, analyze, and leverage your data. View your data in the powerful Branch Dashboard or export attribution data using pre-built integrations with leading partners for your marketing stack and internal business intelligence systems. Branch has powerful and versatile data tools that can be customized to fit your business needs.

Our proven privacy leadership keeps you compliant

Shield your teams from disruptions caused by privacy updates and ecosystem changes. We understand the mobile world is full of chaos, and Branch carries this burden on your behalf. We have maintained a privacy-first stance even when other MMPs were tempted to stray. To ensure your app is compliant, we build privacy solutions so you don’t have to. From innovations such as SafeTrack, Facebook install referrer support, NativeLink, and SKAN 4.0 support, Branch is always future-proofing.  

Sophisticated fraud protection that keeps you from wasting money

Our dynamic, industry-leading fraud tools detect and block fraud before it happens with flexible blocking rules, dashboard visibility, and AI-driven rules that capture highly sophisticated fraud. We leverage Branch’s deep expertise and hands-on fraud mitigation support to protect your resources.

Branch is ready to be your MMP partner

As we mentioned earlier, choosing an MMP is an important decision. This decision requires the participation of a large number of leaders and influencers on your team, and it will have long-term consequences for your business, for better or worse. That is why it is critical to always select an MMP with an excellent reputation, a stable platform, a happy and loyal client base, and the resources to adequately support the volatile demands of the digital ad industry.

However, when you do pick the right MMP for your brand, the final result is an attribution solution that improves your campaign ROI and ultimately grows your app. With unified user experiences and attribution across devices and platforms for over 3 billion users across 100,000 apps since 2014, Branch has unparalleled experience and expertise as a mobile measurement partner.

The post Why You Need an MMP and Why Branch Is the Best Fit appeared first on Branch.

By leveraging SEO App Attribution, marketers can easily identify an app event originating from an organic web search click and then attribute it to the relevant search engine. This allows you to understand the full contribution of SEO on your app growth and make more confident channel marketing decisions. 

We go into much more detail below, but first, let’s explore more about why SEO matters.

Why is SEO so critical?

Search engines were made with one purpose in mind: connecting audiences to relevant web content. However, challenges arose when trying to order search results by page relevance. In order to deliver more relevant and useful results, search engines developed algorithms to rank search results with more consistency based on page content and parameters. This led to the introduction of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), which is defined by Optimizely as: 

“The art and science of getting pages to rank higher in search engines such as Google.” 

SEO is the science (and art) of increasing the likelihood of your website getting higher page visibility when a user is searching online for relevant products or services. The more visibility your website has on search engines, the more likely your link will get clicked.

Companies should always vie for the first page where they are most likely to get the most visibility. Because, in reality, how often does anyone really search beyond the second page of results? For example, the first position on Google generates a typical click through rate (CTR) of 39.6%. This is more than double the CTR for the second position (18.4%) and nearly four times the CTR for the third position (10.1%).

So what are some key benefits of SEO?

Build trust and credibility

If a user finds your site through a search engine, it can lead to better brand engagement, more app traffic, and higher conversions due to higher trust.

Gain a competitive advantage

When good SEO is deployed consistently, those that do it better will outrank the competition and gain a competitive edge at a lower cost than paid channels.

Reach more people

SEO helps attract users with intent at any time and will ideally widen the audience that can discover your brand content and website.

Source: Reliablesoft

SEO has been a blind spot for a long time for most mobile marketers since linking to the app can lead to a loss of visibility. Using Branch’s new SEO App Attribution solution, our customers have discovered that organic web search can be responsible for more than 16% of app opens (source: Branch), which means misattribution of organic search leads to an incomplete picture of a major source of visits and revenue. 

Why is SEO App Attribution a game changer?

SEO is a major growth lever for mobile brands. However, Google’s control and other content challenges have made it harder to measure than most owned, earned, and paid channels. Here are a few reasons why SEO is so hard to measure:

• SEO teams spend countless hours tweaking content to ensure relevant results, but enabling app links historically meant losing visibility into their efforts.
• There is no attribution on native app links by design, which means app sessions may be misattributed when the organic search result was the true last touch point.
• Web-to-app experiences drive significant app acquisitions but have historically lacked the ability to easily tag and attribute those organic app events. 

Branch is a true cross-platform solution for the mobile ecosystem, but attribution is notoriously hard to measure considering users interact with many channels before entering the app. Branch’s mobile linking platform (MLP) delivers industry-leading deep linking and attribution for owned and earned channels. And with SEO App Attribution, we’re unlocking a key channel of the user journey. 

Our SEO App Attribution solution empowers marketers to attribute downstream funnel events back to the search engine that sourced the app session. App events are deduplicated and attributed to the corresponding search engine. This opens a window to SEO performance for a better understanding of SEO’s value and a more complete cross-channel view. 

NO SEO App Attribution

With SEO App Attribution

With SEO App Attribution, you get a clearer view of the bigger marketing picture by gaining insights into app events coming from organic web search traffic. This also helps you avoid some of the typical SEO pain points, including:

• Blind spots in your overall marketing strategy due to limited visibility into the organic search channel.
• Falling behind the competition by not investing enough in SEO, since SEO efforts generally get limited credit for the value they drive.
• Missed budget and KPI goals due to erroneous credit given to paid channels, misattributed from organic traffic.
• User frustration and drop off due to a fragmented web-to-app user experience.
•  

You can even leverage our MLP to acquire net new app users with a personalized web-to-app experience using Journeys. By showing a smart banner or a CTA, you increase the likelihood of driving the organic visitor to your app. Just add tags to your smart banners and let SEO App Attribution do the hard work of capturing and attributing down funnel app events such as installs and purchases.

How does it work?

Get a more complete picture of how your SEO efforts impact app events coming from organic search traffic when you enable SEO App Attribution. For most brands, it does not take any additional technical expertise or developer resources to get started. 

1. Ensure the latest Branch SDK is installed, top-level domains are registered, and Universal Links or App Links are enabled.
2. Once a user clicks on a link indexed from a search engine (e.g. Google, Yahoo), SEO App Attribution collects specific signals and identifies the click as “organic” once the app opens.
3. The Branch SDK simulates a click, it is captured, and attribution of the app user is assigned to the organic search channel.
4. Access your data in the SEO section of the dashboard for review or download.
5.  

Once SEO App Attribution is enabled, you will be able to view organic search performance in the Summary report and in the Sources tab. In addition, the same data is available in Data Exports, Custom Exports, Daily Exports, and Scheduled Logs.

What are the benefits of SEO App Attribution?

SEO App Attribution delivers many benefits to your brand by providing a better user experience across all your links and accurately measuring app events driven by SEO. Key benefits include:

Fewer blind spots 

Get a better understanding of the bigger picture by attributing app events driven by organic search traffic.

Make better decisions

Gain the confidence to make data-backed decisions based on a more complete cross-channel view.

Increase SEO value

Unlock SEO opportunities and budget with clearer visibility into the value SEO can bring to your overall marketing strategy.

Our solution helps extend visibility beyond web traffic. This means you can start attributing app events (e.g. opens, installs, purchases) by preserving existing web attribution and adding incremental visibility to app events. Branch does all this without negatively impacting SEO page ranking.

Branch is ready to help with SEO

Our mobile linking platform (MLP) delivers deep linking and attribution across all your owned and earned channels, including your website. SEO App Attribution gives you the tools you need to capture app insights from organic search traffic.

Branch’s SEO App Attribution unlocks SEO’s potential without hurting search rankings. This allows marketers to cut through the noise, identify organic traffic, and attribute downstream conversions back to the correct referring source — without the guesswork.

Learn more about SEO App Attribution.

The post Why You Need Branch’s SEO App Attribution Solution appeared first on Branch.

We’re excited to continue making Journeys even better to build upon best practices as well as advanced use cases. We’ve recently made quite a few changes to improve usability, provide more creative flexibility, and offer insightful data to improve decision making.  

What is new in Journeys?

Let’s explore the latest and greatest features…

Creatives Manager tool

Easily manage your creatives in a new, dedicated tab within the Branch Dashboard. Now you can create and edit templates, collaborate across teams, and schedule future launch dates all in one place. 

Creatives Optimization (A/B testing) (currently in beta)

Leverage our new A/B testing tab in the dashboard to measure the performance of creatives within a Journeys campaign. Use these insights to make more informed decisions and drive app adoption and conversions.

Updated templates

By popular demand, we have added two new designs. With dozens to choose from, get added flexibility when designing your Journeys campaigns, or edit live Journeys, with the following templates:

• Center overlay with background opacity
• Bottom partial interstitial with background opacity

User experience improvements 

You will also encounter many new improvements that make Journeys much easier to use, including:

• Improved speed with faster pagination 
• Quick reordering of your Journeys’ priorities 
• Easier readability of charts and tables

Improved URL editing

When editing URLs within Journeys, you will no longer see truncated URLs. Viewing the complete URL will allow for easier editing and management of multiple URLs at one time.

The benefits of using Journeys smart banners

Capturing web visitors and converting them into loyal app users is challenging. However, smart banners are a powerful tool for turning web users into high-value app users. Journeys smart banners can alleviate a lot of the pain points generally associated with the web-to-app customer journey. Some of the key benefits include:

1. Easily create and edit smart banners without needing any technical knowledge or developer skills.
2. Personalize the smart banner experience with powerful audience targeting tools whether the user comes from an organic search, an email campaign, or is a repeat visitor.
3. Ensure efficiency and collaboration with the ability to manage all your smart banner creatives and data in one place. 
4. Gather attribution data from referring links and pass it through Journeys for a complete view of the user experience.

Let Branch help 

Our mobile linking platform (MLP) delivers personalized user experiences across all your channels, including your website. Journeys gives you the tools you need to drive your mobile web-to-app growth with increased conversions and higher lifetime value (LTV) users in your app. 

Branch’s Journeys helps you adapt to the web-to-app challenge by allowing you to easily create, personalize, and measure smart banners while capturing accurate and insightful attribution. 

Learn more about Journeys.

Branch provides the industry’s leading mobile linking and measurement platforms, offering solutions that unify user experience and attribution across devices and channels. Branch has been selected by over 100,000 apps since 2014 including Adobe, BuzzFeed, Yelp, and many more, improving experiences for more than 3 billion monthly users across the globe. Learn more about Branch or contact sales today.

Contact sales

The post 5 New Journeys Features To Make Your Smart Banners Even Better  appeared first on Branch.

The evolution of deep linking

Deep linking has been around for a long time and started popping up in tech media around 2006 to highlight the growing practice of providing Google (and other search engines) a way to create visibility for content beyond just a website home page. Over time, deep links turned from a simple tool to bring you to a web page into critical technology that has become complex and powerful. Deep links can now be used across all channels and platforms, embraced today by almost every global omni-channel brand.

Businesses that saw the long-term potential of deep linking have evolved to become experts in everything related to deep linking including routing, measurement, privacy, security, and industry change. Many of these companies have now grown into MMPs that focus solely on paid ad channels. 

However, a smaller subset of companies like Branch have become industry leaders not only as MMPs but also as MLPs that focus on owned and earned channels. The advantage of using a partner like Branch is that you have a solution that provides complete deep linking and attribution coverage of all your channels (i.e. paid, owned, and earned), ad platforms, and networks. The ability to leverage and understand all possible channels is a huge plus in a mobile world of constant change.

What exactly is an MLP?

While MMPs only offer deep linking and measurement for paid ads, MLPs offer deep linking and measurement for owned, earned, and organic channels. They provide a reliable and configurable linking solution for brands that want to ensure their deep links work — reliably and always. Mobile linking platforms also provide insights into performance across non-paid marketing channels.

At its core, a mobile linking platform is a hosted platform that will route all your deep links and provide a portal for creating, editing, and measuring deep links. A mobile linking platform does this while allowing collaboration among teams. Not only that, but you should also expect an MLP to maintain user context across devices, providing detailed measurement reports and valuable insights about how your links (and campaigns) are performing. Ultimately, your mobile linking platform should provide the tools to help your brand drive conversions and increase return on investment (ROI) across non-paid channels such as email, QR codes, organic social, smart banners, and SEO.  

An MLP should deliver a personalized deep linking user experience and measurement that will accelerate conversion growth and increase ROI for any omnichannel brand with an app. You can consider these platforms as deep linking and attribution experts with a deep understanding of how every facet of linking works across channels.

How is an MMP different? 

An MMP focuses solely on paid ad channels. While a mobile measurement platform will leverage deep linking technology and measurement tools similar to an MLP, it also has to engage with complex ad networks that require deep links to work differently at times with many possible edge cases. For example, mobile measurement platforms have to contend with SKAN data and each of the numerous self-attributing networks (SANs). This requires them to prioritize reducing fraud and ensuring privacy compliance across each network. 

So while there is a lot of technology crossover with an MLP, the difference in how MMPs manage links and collect data can be profound. Incorporating an MLP into your omni-channel strategy will benefit you in multiple ways.

How does an MLP work?

An MLP is expected to tie together the deep linking experience and attribution for your owned and earned channels. So what does that mean?

Cloud-based, hosted platform 

An MLP determines which linking experience to use for each visitor. On the web, browsers handle their own routing based on the data contained in the link URL, so the experience feels very seamless to users. However, mobile links can get more complicated. For example,  if the app isn’t installed, the user can get an error message. So, the primary purpose of a hosted platform is to gather the relevant user data (e.g. device type, app installation status, data from link opened) and determine the best possible user experience (website, App Store, Play Store, directly to app), and then seamlessly route users.

SDK interaction 

SDKs allow each app or website to receive instructions from the hosted platform (e.g. an MLP) about what content to display. The app or website leverages the deep link data to understand what content the visitor requested and fires any analytic tasks required. 

All of this sounds easy, but it does require careful choreography so the process feels invisible to the user. SDKs are very valuable because they facilitate deep link usage by wrapping convenient programming interfaces around calls to the hosted platform, making them a very powerful tool that a linking platform brings to the table.

A best-in-class MLP works behind the scenes to give you peace of mind that your links will just work, that you are capturing accurate data, and that the user experience will be seamless.

Should I build an MLP myself?

Sure, it is possible to create and deploy deep links without the use of a technical partner. You can even try to capture attribution by cobbling together data from different platforms. But, below we highlight key reasons why you shouldn’t go down this road.

1. Deep linking requires a lot of technical expertise 

You will need a team of developers who are familiar with different types of mobile devices and operating systems. This includes knowing how to handle the different types of links that can be created and the data that can be captured, which is very complex. They would also need to constantly monitor the links and data to ensure they are performing correctly while troubleshooting any problems.

2. A broken experience will negatively impact your brand 

It can take weeks or even months to build a deep linking and measurement infrastructure from scratch. And, if you’re not careful, it can be easy to make mistakes, like losing context along the user journey or duplicating attribution, causing frustration for users and yourself. Without a user-friendly or reliable deep linking experience, you will see a negative impact on your brand and lose ROI.

3. Deep linking can be expensive 

You can easily spend a significant amount of budget and resources to build and maintain your own deep linking infrastructure. An MLP will allow you to easily create, edit, and measure your link campaigns with a much lower investment while providing tools for data reporting and team collaboration.

If you decide to build this type of linking and measurement infrastructure in-house, you will miss out on many of the benefits of an MLP.

What are the benefits of an MLP?

Let’s drill down into the key benefits of an MLP. At its core, a mobile linking platform is a powerful linking infrastructure. It also provides trusted attribution for owned and earned channels and summarizes data and insights in one place with access across teams.

Scalable and reliable deep linking that just works

A significant benefit of an MLP is to deliver deep links that can be easily deployed across every owned and earned marketing channel, even when users transition from one device to another (for example, desktop to app). A mobile linking platform will keep context by understanding how to route users across use cases where they would typically disappear from view, such as when passing through the App Store or Play Store or in Facebook. Your MLP should also handle those unique edge cases for you so users get a reliable deferred deep linking experience across complicated scenarios, even after install. The most common example of this is deferred deep linking.

Powerful visibility and measurement for owned and earned channels

An MLP helps you measure things that were hard or impossible to measure previously. Its primary goal is to provide brands the tools to accurately attribute installs, opens, and down-funnel, in-app conversions for owned and earned channels while providing a powerful dashboard that displays your performance with detailed insights and flexible reporting. This rich data alone makes an MLP a worthwhile investment.

Unlock new ways to acquire and engage app users with less investment

As many of the old mobile marketing standbys (i.e. paid ads) are getting more difficult and more expensive, an MLP will open up new ways for you to grow your app. You will also save development time with a reliable linking infrastructure. An MLP makes it easy to create and scale links via API, app, dashboard, or Chrome extension across use cases and channels — like customized smart banners, email promotions, and app-enabled QR codes — without a technical lift. 

Industry expertise that will future-proof your mobile growth strategy 

When major changes are announced from Google or Apple (e.g. Private Relay), you won’t need to rebuild your linking strategy with an MLP. Your MLP should have the expertise to quickly understand the impact of these industry changes and provide dedicated deep linking experts who will proactively develop solutions to keep your linking and measurement working as expected. 

Overall, an MLP provides reliable, powerful deep linking and measurement experiences. It also helps you stay ahead of your competitors by constantly developing new, innovative tools to support your complex mobile linking strategies and mobile growth goals. 

Branch is a best-in-class MLP solution

The mobile industry is in a state of constant change and deep linking is not immune to this reality. In addition, major platforms continue to try to keep their users within their walled gardens, making it challenging to link outside of their ecosystems. With Branch, you can offer a personalized link experience across all your channels, accurately measure and attribute your results, and save a ton of development time. Branch’s NativeLink solution is a great example of this type of approach.

Branch’s best-in-class MLP understands how to adapt to all these changes and challenges while allowing you to easily deploy, monitor, and measure deep links. Our MLP delivers unparalleled match rates and links that just work. This, in turn, allows you to drive your mobile growth with increased conversions and higher lifetime value (LTV) users across owned and earned channels. 

Learn more about Branch’s Mobile Linking Platform.

Branch provides the industry’s leading mobile linking and measurement platforms, offering solutions that unify user experience and attribution across devices and channels. Branch has been selected by over 100,000 apps since 2014 including Adobe, BuzzFeed, Yelp, and many more, improving experiences for more than 3 billion monthly users across the globe. Learn more about Branch or contact sales today.

Contact sales

The post What Is a Mobile Linking Platform (MLP) and Why Do You Need One? appeared first on Branch.

The dreaded on-screen keyboard…

Once a user is logged in on one device, why can’t they easily log in on another device without entering the same email and password again? The technology already exists to create this user experience…QR codes. 

In this blog, we will highlight some examples of QR code use cases that can help solve this problem.

Example #1: Use your phone to log in to your desktop apps

Let’s say you get a new laptop. You’re excited to get it all set up but a bit less excited to dig up all your passwords. Even with a password manager, this can be a little disheartening. Now, imagine you open up your favorite website or install your favorite app and, when you go to log in, you are presented with a QR code option. 

You decide to scan the QR code and since you’re already logged into your favorite app (e.g. Netflix, Hulu) on your phone, the QR code opens up the app, and asks if you’re trying to log in? You tap “Yes, log me in” and before you know it, you’re on your way! No fumbling with passwords or a password manager, just a seamless experience using existing QR code technology.

Example #2: Logging into smart TV apps

Okay, using your phone to log in on your desktop is fine, but to be fair, it’s not the most painful place to log in. Let’s say you just bought a new smart TV or the latest popular streaming device (e.g. Roku, Amazon Fire TV, Apple TV). You download your favorite streaming app and then you get the dreaded keyboard screen:

Keyboards on TV screens are a special kind of torture. Why? Users never, NEVER, prefer to log in this way. There are so many creative ways to avoid this situation. Let’s walk through a potential user experience:

Option 1: QR code 

QR code is the most seamless option. Using the Branch QR Code API, a QR code is generated that will defer deep link users if they don’t have the app or take them directly to the app if it is already installed. This also helps media companies with acquisition and engagement of valuable app users. The best part is that once the user finishes logging in on their mobile device, they will be automatically logged in on their TV without having to re-scan the QR code.

Option 2: Short code 

Short code logins have been fairly popular with streaming platforms because they work with both desktop and mobile devices. The user simply goes to the highlighted URL to enter the code and, similar to QR codes, they are automatically logged in on their TV.

Option 3: On-screen keyboard 

Finally, the user could also choose the on-screen keyboard which requires using the TV remote to manually type their email and password. This user experience generally makes people want to throw their remote across the room. Why not let them choose an easier way to log in? This should be a last resort.

What if you’re not logged in on your phone?

Let’s flip the tables a bit. You’re logged in and streaming on your laptop while traveling. Remembering that you have a flight in the morning, you decide to download the latest version of your streaming app on your phone to ensure you can watch movies on the plane. You open the mobile app and suddenly you’re less excited about streaming on tomorrow’s flight because you get the typical login screen.

However, you notice something curious — “sign in from another device”. You tap it, and a QR code scanner pops up. It directs you to log in using your computer or even your TV simply by scanning the QR code. Yes please!

Voila! You’re now logged in on your phone. Password-less handoff of your login info from one device to another.

QR codes and the authentication circle

In fact, most devices can be used to log in to another device. The options of QR codes or short codes provide paths for users to authenticate on any device, from any device. Once a user is logged in somewhere, they should be able to easily log in anywhere. Using QR codes, you can make the login process an excellent user experience.

Best-in-class QR codes, powered by Branch

Branch supports our customers with best-in-class QR codes. Cross-device logins powered by Branch QR codes are a powerful solution that bridge the gap between desktop, mobile, and over-the-top (OTT). Leverage the power of QR codes to increase app adoption, get a more holistic picture of your marketing campaigns, and ensure users are directed to the right content.

Our flexible API allows creating branded QR codes in real-time, personalized to each user. Branch enables you to offer cross-device login and deep linking via QR codes by leveraging our mobile linking platform (MLP). Brands that reduce friction with QR codes will have higher conversions and users will spend more time on your platform, across all their devices.

Learn more about Branch QR Codes here!

Branch provides the industry’s leading mobile linking and measurement platforms, offering solutions that unify user experience and attribution across devices and channels. Branch has been selected by over 100,000 apps since 2014 including Adobe, BuzzFeed, Yelp, and many more, improving experiences for more than 3 billion monthly users across the globe. Learn more about Branch or contact sales today.

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