OneLink API: Driving seamless user experiences at scale
Deep linking has changed the game for mobile app marketing.
The ability to rapidly drive users to the optimal screen within the app, and within the right context has unlocked a world of new opportunities for savvy app marketers and developers.
Whether they’re used for driving users from the mobile web to a native app, personalizing the onboarding experience or driving re-engagement from owned and earned media channels, deep links have proven time and again to be a powerful technology to boost user acquisition and retention.
Manually or programmatically?
In most cases, deep links can be generated and managed manually.
For example, let’s say that you’re running an outbound email campaign for your holiday weekend sales, driving users to a specific in-app destination (weekend sales page), and offering a discount as an incentive to make a purchase in your app.
To do so, you can generate a deep link for your email blast CTA through the Link Management interface in your AppsFlyer dashboard.
That single deep link will send every user to the right page in your app (even if it is preceded by an install), parsing parameters such as the discount amount, campaign name, media source (email, in this case), promo code and unlimited custom parameters. With a single link, you can cover every scenario, regardless of the user’s device, OS, and platform.
To enable more advanced use cases, you’ll need to automatically generate deep links in bulk.
This is especially relevant when you want to seamlessly generate unique OneLink-based attribution links which can be used as an organic part of your peer-to-peer flows.
This is where OneLink API comes into play
The OneLink REST API provides programmatic access to seamlessly generate, read, modify and delete deep short links at scale.
This powerful API makes the creation of tens of thousands OneLink URLs daily an effortless and automatic process.
Let’s say you run app marketing for a major shopping app and you want to drive re-engagement from churned app users.
You know that SMS regularly enjoys a 94% read rate within minutes of receiving the text message, and decide to send SMS triggers to recover abandoned shopping carts.
However, in this particular SMS campaign, every offer is tailored to the items abandoned in the cart (different discount) and every user should be sent to a different destination (item abandoned in cart). In other words, every deep link needs to be defined with different query parameters.
Using the OneLink API, you can create short deep links for your SMS campaigns in bulk.
When the deep link is clicked on, the user is sent to the content that matters – in this case the discounted product left in their cart – while maintaining the context for an optimal user experience across mobile web and the native app.
Get the latest marketing news and expert insights delivered to your inbox
If you’re promoting a limited-time sale, you can – once the sale period is over – edit your deep link programmatically by overriding the URL logic. Simply add the new attribution link parameters to the link, and all your clicks will be redirected to the new URL.
This SMS strategy is also remarkably powerful to bring back users who have uninstalled your app.
First, they will be sent to the right app store and then, to the contextual content within your app.
Best of all, you can use the contextual information sent back to the SDK to personalize the onboarding experience.
That’s just the beginning. There’s a whole lot more you can do with OneLink.
Whether created manually or programmatically, OneLink is built with incredibly robust integrations for a variety of use cases – peer-to-peer user invites, email marketing, SMS campaigns, web-to-app banners, cross-app promotions, referral programs, QR codes, and more.
And every click and in-app event is measured, attributed and reported in the AppsFlyer dashboard so you can make informed business decisions in real-time.
Want to learn more about OneLink and the OneLink API? Talk to your Success Manager or schedule an AppsFlyer demo today.
