Ep. #12, Mobile Deep Linking with Daniel Johnson of Branch

Eden Full Goh: Hey, Daniel. Thank you so much for joining me here on the How It's Tested podcast.

Daniel Johnson: Thank you so much for having me, Eden. It's a pleasure.

Eden: It's really cool to have you here. I think what's been interesting is recently here at Mobot, we've started to get a lot of interest from different stakeholders, companies, teams that are interested in learning more about how MarTech integrates with existing mobile products.

We've also seen just some interesting applications of how our technology and our platform is being used by marketing teams.

And so, I thought that this would be a great opportunity to just speak with an expert like you and just learn more about your role, what you're working on at Branch, kind of like how you've been working with different customers and companies across different verticals and industry segments.

And so yeah, thank you so much again for taking the time.

Daniel: Yeah, I much appreciate it. I would say likewise, you know, even in the market, we hear a lot of companies using Mobot for different use cases and getting to speak with you today about why our industry is so important is really impactful. So, I'm looking forward to our conversation.

Eden: Yeah. Maybe to kick us off, it would be super great if you could give a little bit of an overview of kind of your background and what led you to your current role at Branch.

Daniel: Yeah, sounds good. So, my name is Daniel Johnson, I've been in the MarTech and AdTech industry for about five plus years.

I spent about three years at Google working on some privacy-centric measurement stuff and then at Microsoft, as well, within their ad space and you know, product marketing, mobile usage and linking has literally always been an interest of mine just being a consumer.

You know, like if my mother sent me a shoe from Zara, like, how does she send me that specific shoe? How do I know exactly which shoe she wants me to click on once I go to the website? And I've always wanted to do this, you know, deeper dive in into what that actually means.

So, I've been at Branch for a little under a year now where right now I'm primarily focused on our customer platform and also our linking side of the business.

So, literally that idea of how do we take consumers to specific content within relevant apps and how do we make that experience more user friendly and more efficient for both the customer and the end user, as well.

Eden: Yeah, I definitely want to dive into your observations about how the marketing space and the MarTech tech stack has evolved over time. But before we jump into all of that, could you explain what is the different products you're working on at Branch and just like what is Branch's focus on and the impact they've had on the industry?

Daniel: So, I would say specifically for starters, you know, what exactly do we do at Branch is we provide the leading mobile linking platform with solutions that unify both user experience and the measurement across different platforms and channels.

You know, the idea of an app and like why it's important for users to have such efficient and friendly experiences within those apps are super important to us and the overall industry, as well.

I would say like the lifetime of value of an app user is about three times higher than a web user. So to us, it's how can we help provide those seamless transitions from a user to an app to the product or the content that they want to see.

So, over the past eight months I've had the privilege of being in those rooms where we updated a lot of our linking products, such as something we call LinkHub, such as Link Templates, such as if you have integrations you are doing primarily with deep links.

So again, it's the idea of you have an app but you want to take consumers to specific content in the app rather than just a generic homepage. How do we do that? And it's our job at Branch to make that transition more seamless as possible.

And then we also have an ads side of the house in which they work primarily on the page space, but for me specifically, I'm moreso focused on those linking experiences and again, how can we create those more seamless transitions from app to content, content to app, et cetera.

Eden: I see, and so, in terms of the product that Branch is offering, this is a software development library or kit that engineering teams will implement and then there's a dashboard that mobile marketing teams are sort of leveraging in order to create new campaigns, create new links that sort of talk to the SDK that's been implemented in a native iOS or Android mobile app. Is that right?

Daniel: Yeah, exactly. And then when this SDK implemented on our dashboard, we're able to give very useful and business-critical data back to our customers such as, you know, actual link clicks, app installs, user engagement, conversion rates, a few down funnel functions, as well.

So, having that SDK implemented within the app itself allows our company and our tools to read it and also give valuable insights back to the customers when their consumers use their app and create those funnels and actions on the app itself.

Eden: Yeah, I think one of the things I've always really appreciated about the Branch platform is it creates an interesting opportunity for engineering teams and product teams to work more closely with marketing because there are multiple stakeholders in order to kind of get this all to come together.

And it ultimately manifests in pretty business-critical outcomes for these businesses and also provides like more of an opportunity for the mobile app to play a bigger and bigger role in the business and how it's driving additional usage and giving also like marketing teams, it sounds like, more opportunity to be able to like control different aspects of the product.

Daniel: Yeah, a hundred percent. And it's pretty funny you mentioned that because we've been able to do some really interesting campaigns when it comes to engineering marketing and their support team using these links.

And I love to give an example or two if you think that might be helpful for the audience, as well.

Eden: Yeah, let's do it.

Daniel: So over my eight months here, you know, we've been working very closely with Spotify, which is one of the leading music streaming apps today.

Something very interesting that they're doing right now is their engineering team and their marketing team is focused on how do we get users from offline to app, and one of the things they're using for offline conversions are billboards.

So you know, imagine you're driving in New York City, Chicago, Atlanta or wherever you may be, and you look up on a billboard and you see a Spotify QR code. They're using us for, you know, when consumers scan that QR code, it takes them directly to a specific relevant playlist content within the app itself.

So, it is pretty cool and like unique the things that go on in the background that consumers might not be aware of. You know, like how is Spotify able to show a QR code, I scan it, and instead of that QR code sending me directly to the Spotify app, it takes me beyond the app and it takes me to specific relevant playlist content that I was searching for.

So yeah, like, we're giving engineering teams, we're giving product teams and we're giving marketing teams a cool way to have an intersection and a voice in all those business decisions.

Eden: Could you sort of walk me through like a team like Spotify, like how they even get started with setting this up because, yeah, there's stakeholder buy-in on the engineering team, the product team.

They have to agree that like they want QR codes to be part of the user journey, and then like it sounds like the marketing team is the one configuring all the different QR codes.

Like, if something goes to a Billie Eilish playlist or, you know, a particular new song that just came out, who is managing all of that? How does that like kind of from start to finish, what is that lifecycle of a QR code if you will? It'd be helpful to understand that.

Daniel: Yeah, for sure. So here at Branch, we use our tool stack and we give our customers options in which, you know, which product feature at the time they think might be more beneficial.

So, even aside from QR codes, Spotify can come to us and say hey, like that dude today, rather, we have specific curated content and we want to take users specifically to this relevant playlist in our app. So, don't take them to the Spotify home screen.

We want to create a seamless journey for when the consumer sees something interesting and it might take them to a Billie Eilish playlist because we know that they are Billie Eilish fans.

So, it'll first start off in a conversation with our sales team. They'll uncover pain points. They'll uncover use cases, and then on the linking side, they can choose between QR codes, deep links, short links, whatever their business use case is at the time.

In the background, we're hosting a ton of hundreds of different links that are configured based on the engineering team and the marketing team itself. So, it's important, when these deep links are live that the actual configuration of them are also appropriate because we don't want any broken experiences or a delay in consumer trust because this link didn't take them directly to where it wanted to go.

So, it goes even beyond the marketing engineering team. On our side, we're working very closely with our customer support, with our engineering, with our Q&A, with our marketing, with our TAMs to make sure that the links itself work properly and that they always link back to the appropriate content of the app itself.

So, Spotify has been doing a lot of interesting stuff with us lately and really focus on again, for right now, that conversion between offline to app.

So, there are a lot of things going on in the background and our teams are working around the clock to make sure the links are configured correctly, to make sure the content is going to the right place at the right time to the right consumer so that, again, we aren't breaking something so valuable for them, which is user trust.

Eden: How do you guys actually validate, especially because I'm sure there's so many playlists. There's so many, you know, potential journeys and flows and campaigns that are going on.

They're getting turned on and off at all the different times. How does Branch do some of this like validation and checking and do you have any visibility into like how Spotify is also managing this?

Daniel: Yeah, so not a ton of visibility into how Spotify are managing the links on their end, but on our side, the cool thing about our linking tools is that we do have some validation data and also some features that we have available for customers so that they can implement these tools before the links go live so that they can see themselves if the links will work properly.

So, we work very closely with the customer itself, which is Spotify, and they have a dedicated TAM or technical account manager.

They have a dedicated account executive or AE, and on the back end, we're making sure that those things maps correctly, that the link domain is spelled correctly, that it's linking to the proper content, 'cause as a consumer, you wouldn't want to scan a playlist that was aimed at Billie Eilish but it takes you to Michael Jackson or it takes you to a totally different irrelevant artist that you are expecting to.

So, we work very closely with our technical teams. We have a house full of links and like where they're supposed to go, and on the Spotify side, and on the customer's side across the platform, they also do a good job of making sure the links itself are configured correctly on the backend, as well.

So, it's truly a partnership and that's really one thing that I really appreciate about working at Branch is that we get to work with some of the largest customers, right? And we have a direct hand in making sure that the links for their consumers work as appropriate as they should.

So, we're in those rooms with them. We're in those rooms doing QA. You know, we're in those rooms making sure everything is configured before it goes live to the customer.

Eden: That's awesome. I use Spotify all the time as a consumer and I don't think about just like how complicated it must be with all the different artists, labels, paths, scenarios, and yeah, there's like songs versus albums versus playlists and everything.

I can totally see how, yeah, there's actually tremendous nuances that you have to kind of manage around.

Daniel: Exactly, yeah. You have songs. You got playlist. You have albums. Let's say I want it to link you to specific lyrics within a song. That's also a link itself.

So, you know, before I started working at Branch and even now, like, I kind of have the learns and the eyes of both a consumer and in both a professional within our mobile marketing and mobile linking space.

So you know, there again, there are a ton of different nuances, and if one thing is off, the other thing is broken. And as you all know, a broken linking experience has tremendous impact on both marketing performance and trust.

The mobile usage right now is so high, consumers, like, our time span on different phones for different apps is so short. So, if something doesn't work on Spotify or something doesn't work on another link you have, I'm onto the next. So as marketers, we really have to make sure that while we have the attention of our consumers that we're doing it correctly. The linking. and the mobile linking specifically, is a huge component of that.

Eden: Yeah. I'm very curious 'cause I know you started your career working with like web marketing at Google and Microsoft, but now you're in the world of mobile and I think it's, at least from my perspective, mobile seems more complicated.

There's iOS and Android, and even on the Android, there's like Samsung versus Google Pixel versus all these other providers, and the deep links, I think they come from different apps, right?

So they're, you know, it could come from an email link. It could come from a message. It could come from a QR code that you scan. In your experience, like how should an engineering team or a mobile marketing team be managing all of these different variations and kind of like making sure that everything works?

Like, what are some best practices you've seen and just like curious your observations on that?

Daniel: Yeah, that's a great question. I think honestly like just starters, one thing that marketers and professionals at different companies can do is truly utilize a sophisticated MLP or mobile linking partner.

It's our job at companies like Branch to kind of remove the guesswork for these different companies as they navigate these complexities and challenges between the mobile and web in which, you know, engineering dollars and engineering resources now could be short, you know, and companies are working with less now.

So like, how do you remove the guesswork and how do you make sure that your campaigns both on web and mobile are optimized correctly? And I think over the two years, well, I would say one or two years now, we've seen a lot of flexibility but also evolving from different social media platforms, which are both on web and mobile.

If you look at things like Facebook, you look at Twitter, you look at Instagram, I think it's important to call out that these different platforms that marketers and sometimes business decision thinkers don't really think about is they're truly walled gardens. And in a nutshell, a walled garden is made in order to keep users within those social media platforms. So once Twitter, Instagram, Meta has you within their apps, they want to keep you there.

They don't want to make it that seamless for, you know, a consumer to go from the social media platform directly to your app. So that's why working with companies like us at MLPs, we help to navigate these complexities.

You know, we are truly a partner, like, in this evolution with you. And I think just starting there, utilizing MLP. Even before I came over to the mobile side, I never really understood like okay, the true importance of working with a mobile partner, but we really remove the guesswork for you as much as we can.

And you know, we're all within the evolving digital marketing landscape together, and working with somebody that's sophisticated on that side of the house can save companies so much time, so many mistakes, and honestly, so much wasted marketing dollars, as well.

Eden: Yeah, I agree with all of that. I feel like this is still an up and coming space in industry that's starting to get more attention.

We've definitely seen like a lot more interest in, especially in-- Mobot is kind of touching on a number of different workflows and use cases across the mobile industry and whether it's, you know, phone, tablets, other peripherals, connected devices.

But I think yeah, there's definitely been sort of this common thread that's popping up where more folks are thinking about how your product, your app is interacting with someone else's code or app or product.

And I think, that's definitely something that sounds like Branch helps to facilitate for companies like Spotify, and you know, it's definitely something that as we've been supporting, you know, your team and also been looking at this use case, as well, and really automating a lot of the things that are historically un-automatable because there have been just so many different, complex third party walled gardens.

I think you described it correctly. I'm curious like how do you think this industry is going to continue to evolve?

The world is increasingly mobile-focused, and every day, every week there's like a new social media walled garden popping up. Like, how do you keep up with this?

How does Branch keep up with this? How should good, like, product and engineering teams keep up with all these changes? And also like, yeah, how should MarTech teams be thinking about this?

Daniel: Yeah, I think specifically for my generation, like, we live on our phones, you know. There isn't an hour that goes by when we're not checking a new social media platform, where we're not absorbing some type of content just through our mobile devices. And I think companies have to realize that, you know?

Right now, the lifetime value of an app user, again, it's probably around three times higher than a web user, but I only see that increasing and I think companies have to start thinking more strategically about where they're spending their marketing dollars.

How do you measure the cost of an impression? Do you measure that more if a consumer sees or views something on a mobile phone versus TV versus out of home? And like what are you doing with your marketing stack to make sure that you as a company, you're keeping up with these different challenges and different nuances in the industry?

So, if you ask me to take a step back or step forward rather and look at the world in maybe three to four years from now, I can truly see a world where mobile marketing is dominating like never before.

I can see a world where even if you look at today with the updates to iOS, Apple is becoming very sophisticated on the artificial intelligence out of the house. And Apple already has a pretty dominant impact on the market share between different devices or between, you know, their app source, as well.

Every single day there are thousands of apps coming newer, coming better, right, to the app store itself. So I think companies and marketers have to think very, very strategically about where they're spending their dollars.

And even if you take all of that aside and look at the macroeconomic trends, you know, our economy right now isn't as strong as it could be and I think not even consumers, but businesses are doing more with less.

And I think the way to do more with less is try to get in front of consumers when they're on their phones more or when they're on their devices more. So very thinking strategically about like how as a company, how can Spotify ensure that five years down the line from now, their usage for playlists aren't decreasing?

Or how can a company like Nike ensure that consumers are seeing the newer shoes? If they're not consuming content on a desktop, they're seeing it on a mobile phone.

So, I think companies have to invest more in this space and I think we have get more sophisticated about that, you know, what that really looks like.

And again, utilizing a mobile linking platform, I cannot stress how important that is enough because we remove the guesswork for you, you know, how these walled gardens operate, the changing regulations with the FTC in terms of like, you know, what it means to have data and store it correctly and legally.

That's also changing weekly, monthly, et cetera. And so, working with companies like us, and even Mobot, as well, we helped remove that guess work, so I think companies need to do that more and start there.

Eden: It's been really illuminating to hear about just the way that Spotify's been leveraging this kind of technology. Do you have any other case studies or examples that you think kind of also highlight just like how complex this all is and how cool this all is?

Daniel: Yeah, so about a year and a half ago we were working very closely with Adobe.

At that time, Adobe had a newer app. They called it Spark, in which they wanted an interesting way to route users to specific pages within Spark, which was at the time a free graphic design app.

They created these SEO pages tailored specific to keyword searches, but they were quickly realizing that when the consumers were opening these pages, they were taken directly to the home screen itself and not that specific SEO tailored page they we're looking for. So in the eyes of Adobe, this was a broken experience.

So, they reached out to a mobile linking partner like us at Branch and after implementing Branch deep links, their conversions and metrics were night and day.

I believe conversions increased by roughly 95%, and they were able to move customers along the creation journey much faster. So, from creating one graphic to sign up to creating a second one to then becoming an advocate of the product itself.

And for us, we really felt strong and very appreciative to help fix this problem for them because they were experienced a broken experience for consumers. And as you all said earlier--

When you have a broken experience for consumers, not only do you lose conversions, but you also lose something that's so valuable, which is their trust. When things don't work as anticipated, especially on a mobile phone, we're onto the next, you know, and you only have a finite amount of time to really grab the attention of your consumers.

So, when Adobe worked with us, they were able to remove that broken experience and again, route users and link users directly to that specific content.

And as someone that's been an avid Adobe user myself, even before coming to Branch, if I wasn't using Adobe, like, maybe I would use something else if my experience is broken.

So, I'll try to put myself in the shoes of a consumer whenever I'm working with specific apps and notice that if things don't work for them, it's probably not working for me and how do we fix it quickly, you know, to help alleviate a chance of losing something so valuable, which is trust.

Eden: And so, when your customers are sort of performing this kind of link campaign validation and monitoring, it sounds like links and campaigns can break for a number of different reasons.

In your experience, kind of like as they're doing QA and validation, what are kind of the reasons that things end up breaking and what have you seen are common trends around that?

Daniel: I think links can break for a multitude of reasons. And I think something so simple as a misspelled URL or you know, the format of the original linked content has been moved or maybe the different domains don't match.

When any of these small things happen, they have big and large results of that, which often are negative. On our end though, again, we have tools in place that help marketers feel more confident about their linking configuration before they go live.

So, you know, they have more trust that when their links are deployed and when the consumers are interacting with these links, the URL isn't misspelled. You know, the domain names do match.

The original content in which they own or they're in, if it's all still there, then our tool is able to pick that up and and give them resources and say, hey, something's missing. Something's broken and let's fix it together.

Eden: For the validation that's being done, it sounds like Branch has some internal supporting tools that help to do some of these validations, but do you know if customers are doing their own? Is it manual testing?

Does someone actually have to scan a QR code manually to check that the link works? Is there like an automation tool that has been implemented at your customers or even at Branch?

Daniel: So, we have a few things in place now. Something that we've seen customers utilize a lot is a link template.

So, by using the templates, we remove the guesswork for our customers of like, okay, what goes where? How does this work? How does it look? And they still going to get template for you to fill out yourself.

In terms of if customers are scanning QR codes or you know, someone from these businesses are doing the work for them before they go live, I'm sure of it, you know.

I haven't heard a specific story in which to say a Spotify or on their end, someone is going in and scanning QR codes before they go live, but with our QR builder, and again, with the link templates, our customers can feel more secure that when these things are implemented correctly and then when they fill in the template itself that the links would work.

And again, we do a good job of Q&A and also working with them hand in hand to make sure that the different parameters and different URLs or different domains are put in the correct place and not even only put in the correct place, but literally something small that is spelled correctly.

You'd be surprised the problems that an I versus an L can have on the marketing campaign.

Eden: Yeah, we've definitely seen a lot of adoption of these kind of campaigns and links in the market and that's also what's been coming top of mind for us because our technology at Mobot has the potential to, exactly like you're saying, scan a QR code and make sure that it links to the correct place and bounce from one third party app to the other and helping with that final sort of check and validation process pre or post-production.

I think that's something that, you know, our platform, we've been really focused on building out our roadmap to support use cases like that. So, it's really cool to actually hear from you, like, how that works on the other side and how you've been seeing that, you know, this kind of technology is being adopted across the industry.

Daniel: Yeah, yeah, for sure. And you know, I'd also love to hear this more about, given that I guess we're technically on two different sides of the house and, you know, Mobot from the Q&A and testing perspective.

Curious, you know, what you're seeing in the industry as far as, you know, different customers of different sizes or different verticals of how they're using your products and, you know, how they're thinking about deep linking and mobile usage going forward, as well?

Eden: Yeah, what's really interesting is as there are new MarTech tools and just like the proliferation of campaigns and links and the emphasis on mobile growth continues to really increase over the next few years, we've seen that there's too much to manage, but at the same time, marketers are becoming more technical and it is almost like complex engineering that they're doing and they're able to use, for example, a platform like Branch to build their own tech stack, to build their own tooling from end to end.

And so, we've had some pretty exciting conversations over the last few months about how, you know, once these campaigns and links are built, Mobot can be, you know, leveraged to automate and validate some of those things end to end so that this work doesn't have to be done manually.

Because there are hundreds, thousands of campaigns and links out there that have to be covered. And I think there's a lot of tools that are making it easy to author and create these campaigns, and marketers are more empowered than ever.

It is also, I think, driving a really exciting cross-functional conversation where marketing teams and engineering teams are working closely together to launch things together, to implement tools together.

I think it's been really cool for our team to just sort of be sitting on the sidelines, watching some of that and seeing that evolve. So, I think that's been really interesting for us to see.

But we're very much fascinated by how, with the proliferation of AI, with all these tools that marketers, it is a very technical, like, there's an interesting discipline that's really just appearing, I think, where previously, and this is kind of the case for a lot of things in the industry where technical skills and technical roles used to mostly only apply to engineering and QA, but we're now seeing that product managers can be technical.

Product marketers can be technical. Growth marketers, mobile marketers, the folks that use Branch every day as an end user, they can be technical, as well.

And I think that opportunity is something that's really exciting, but I think with that there will be a need for tools that will also support all those workflows.

And so, that's why we're very much at Mobot interested in supporting those kinds of teams, especially in automating the things that historically are just so complex and un-automatable or there's so many third party dependencies that it's not possible to kind of script all of this with software, that it's helpful to actually have a physical, mechanical robot be automating some of these workflows.

Daniel: Yeah, and you know, even something that I think is really interesting, not only just in our industry, but like, you know, how different teams work together is again, the marketers now are becoming or having to become, rather, like more technical than before.

Oddly enough though, I'm in a alliance called Product Marketing Alliance in which we've literally had a conversation about this as far as like how different marketing teams are evolving and how we're having to evolve on the fly because different nuances and, you know, the technology around us is shifting quite a bit.

So, even here at Branch, like, in the marketing seat, we work very, very closely with our product team, with our engineering team.

Like, we're all in the same rooms together, bouncing off ideas, giving insights to what's happening not only in the market but also what's happening within our more clinical tools.

So, I think having that concept in mind and then having partners like yourself on the Mobot team who also seems to be very interested in how marketing is becoming more technical and how product managers become more technical.

I think we can give our customers like more assurance that even the marketers at our companies, not only do we understand the marketing problems, but we understand the different technical stacks and the different, you know, technical nuances as to how these products should operate and how we can give benefit to our customers moving forward.

So, I'm just happy to hear that and I'm happy to hear that customers are coming to Mobot for that reason and also coming to Branch for the same reasons to get validations within the mobile space as things continue to evolve.

Eden: You mentioned at the beginning of our session that the value of a mobile app install or user is far greater than that of like a website visit from a user.

How do you think this is going to continue to evolve over the next few years? Is that gap going to continue to widen and like yeah, what are your kind of personal perspectives on the industry of what's trending?

Daniel: That's a great question, and honestly, I think it's only going to increase more.

If you take a step back and just look at where consumers are receiving their content, a lot of it are through different apps like X, formerly known as Twitter, like TikTok, right?

Like, these apps are literally consuming the different hours and different times of days for this generation of consumers and the next generation, as well.

So again, I only see this increasing, and again, if we're using our phones so much, I think companies have to think very strategically about their apps. You know, are the apps easy to use?

Do the apps have cohesion between the app and the website? You know, are the different workflows or the different products that we have within the apps, are they relevant to what we want to say as a brand?

Because even if it's far greater today, again, the next four to five years, 10 years, I only see that increasing more. I do not see reversing anytime soon.

Eden: Thanks so much, Daniel, for joining us today on the How It's Tested podcast. Really enjoyed our conversation, and I hope that this has sparked some ideas for folks listening to figure out how they might want to implement some of these ideas in their mobile products that they're building.

Daniel: Thank you for having me. I thoroughly enjoyed our conversation and again, I think coming from this conversation, hopefully, all our customers and different listeners today, like, maybe they understand how important it is for them to create cohesion within their apps and their different websites and products, as well.

And I guess the true nuances of like the real and the vast important project stacks that we have to do on the backend to make sure these links operate correctly.

So, thank you for all the hard work you do for our industry and now I'm looking forward to our next conversation.

Eden: Thank you.