Create personalized, contextual journeys from anywhere to your app with AppsFlyer

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As the customer experience becomes increasingly mobile-centric, consumers expect brands to meet them where they are, jumping between devices, platforms, and channels without skipping a beat. Now more than ever, brands face the challenge of piecing together a coherent and complete customer identity from the sea of data points created during every brand interaction across web, app, email, and more. 

Creating tailored experiences helps brands lift campaign performance metrics across email, mobile web, ad networks, social media, and offline channels to drive significant Return on Experience (ROX) in the form of increased revenue, installs, retention, and LTV.

What you’ll learn

In this recipe, you’ll learn how to set up your customer experiences for success with advanced engagement and deep linking capabilities that take users directly to their desired app destination from the mobile web, powered by the AppsFlyer customer experience and deep linking suite. 

With the right engagement tools, you can execute connected, cross-channel campaigns that encompass all of your available channels, helping you catapult your UA and re-engagement strategies to the next level.

Setting up web-to-app experiences with Segment and AppsFlyer

Let’s take the web-to-app experience as an example and dive into how to set it up with Segment and AppsFlyer.

Web-to-app: Convert web visitors into loyal app users

Web-to-app experiences boost UA and engagement with frictionless digital journeys from mobile websites to in-app content. These journeys begin on the website itself or from campaigns that lead to the website. Smart Banners and Smart Scripts dynamically generate links behind banners, web copy, CTAs, badges, and more, to effectively drive and measure traffic to your app. They capture mid-funnel, high-intent users arriving at your site, giving you the opportunity to educate and progress them to your app.

Here’s how to set up the web-to-app experience: 

Step 1: Let’s start with connecting Segment and AppsFlyer by following the steps below. For more detailed instructions, take a look at this article. 

• Before you begin, make sure AppsFlyer supports the source type and connection mode you’ve chosen to implement. You can learn more about connection modes here.

• From the Segment web app, click ‘Catalog’.

• Search for “AppsFlyer” in the Catalog, select it, and choose which of your sources to connect the destination to.

• In the destination settings, enter your AppsFlyer Dev Key, which can be retrieved from the ‘App Settings’ section of your AppsFlyer account.

• Follow the instructions in the GitHub repositories: iOS SDK and Android SDK.

• After you build and release to the app store, Segment will start translating and sending your data to AppsFlyer automatically.

In this example, we will outline the setup process for a Smart Banner.

Before we dive into designing and defining the Smart Banner’s appearance and behavior we’ll need to create a website workplace.

During your onboarding wizard you’ll create your first website, banner group, and banner. Learn More

Step 2: Next, navigate to the “Web-to-app” page within the AppsFlyer dashboard (under “Experiences & Deep linking”) and choose either the “Smart Banner” or “Smart Script” option.

Step 3: To create a new Smart Banner navigate to the “Studio” tab

Step 4: Create a new banner group through the “New” button

Step 5: Define the following Smart Banner group details:

• Banner Group name.

• Redirection and deep linking logic: Define the OneLink template you wish to use and Add URI scheme to launch the app (optional).

• Attribution: Select which sources will be attributed for new installs that come from this banner. Add attribution parameters. Learn more

• Behavior: Set the banner frequency capping for the user experience.

• Operating system: Define if this banner will be specific for a certain OS or if it will appear across all OSs.

• Schedule: Set the banner presentation timeframe.

• Locations: Define in which countries this banner will run.

• Show on pages: Determine if this banner will be presented across your entire site or only on specific pages.

Once all the settings are configured, click “Create banner group” to confirm your setup. 

Step 6: Once your banner group is created click “+ Add banner” to reach the Smart Banner setup.

Step 7: Give your banner a distinctive name and start designing it by clicking “Design creative”.

• Choose a design template from the “Creative Editor ” menu.

• Define color, title, description, fonts, and image background in line with your brand. To learn more about Smart Banner best practices, check out this guide.

And voila, your Smart Banner is ready! All that’s left to do is to integrate the Smart Banner code snippet into your website to display your banners.

To do that, implement the Smart Banners code on your site by following the website workplace instructions to get the Smart Banners code and instruct your developer to follow the implementation guide. Or, use the platform-specific instructions to implement the code into your website via platforms such as Google tag manager - Learn more. 

Testing: Once the creative is ready, it's time to put it to the test before setting it live and activating it for your users. Learn more

Measurement: Once your Smart Banner is live, make sure to follow up on its performance in the Smart Banner Performance tab. Learn more

Examples of web-to-app experiences powered by AppsFlyer’s CX and deep linking solution 

Take a look at some use cases that are powered by the web-to-app experience.   

Example #1:

In the example above, a shopper has added products to their basket from their favorite supermarket’s online store. The supermarket has recently launched an app with a better shopping experience and they would like to direct their loyal web users to the app. By implementing Smart Banners across the site (and offering a small discount on their next purchase via the app), the supermarket manages to migrate many loyal web users to their app. 

The most critical part of the experience for the customer takes place after the install, when they launch the app and discover that their entire cart from the web was also migrated to the app, and the app launched on the very same page they were browsing.

Example #2:

In this example, a user is reading a blog post about the benefits of a specific workout routine on a health and fitness brand’s mobile site. The brand implements a Smart Banner with contextualized content, prompting the user to try the workout and redirecting them to download the brand’s mobile app in the right app store. The user installs and opens the app and is immediately redirected to the same routine that they were reading about in the blog article. 

Achieving exceptional experiences with AppsFlyer and Twilio Segment 

Segment’s Customer Data Platform allows you to unify all of your customers’ touch points in real time into a single, aggregated customer database. Bringing this rich data together with AppsFlyer’s measurement data and marketing analytics enables you to build targeted campaigns that attract and retain highly engaged users over time, based on their web and mobile activities.

AppsFlyer’s customer experience and deep-linking suite allows you to drive users directly to your app, from wherever they are. For additional use cases for leveraging Segment and Appsflyer, including powering email-to-app, QR Code-to-app, text-to-app, and more, please reach out to AppsFlyer at segment.biz@appsflyer.com

Wrapping Up 

Here’s what we’ve done in this growth recipe:

• Highlighted the importance of creating personalized experiences, to drive ROX in the form of increased revenue, installs, retention, and LTV .
• Discussed how to set up your customer experiences for success with advanced engagement and deep linking capabilities.
• Outlined how to set up a sample experience (web-to-app) in the AppsFlyer dashboard and showed how brands can use this experience to their advantage to drive users to their app.