I am quite new to mobile development. At the moment I am trying to run a mobile app (iOS and Android) advertising campaign on Adwords, iAd, Twitter and Facebook.
I would like my ads to deep-link into a specific section of the app (closest to a check out page).
Could a more seasoned developer explain what will happen in the following scenarios:
Person using iOS sees an ad on Google or Apple's ad network, or Facebook, or Twitter, and then clicks on the ad. The ad has a deep-link which tries to open the app and send the user to a particular screen. However, the user doesn't have the app. Question 1: What happens? Question 2: If there is an error, then how can this sort of user journey be fixed?
Person using ANDROID sees an ad on Google, or Facebook, or Twitter, and then clicks on the ad. The ad has a deep-link which tries to open the app and send the user to a particular screen. However, the user doesn't have the app. Question 1: What happens? Question 2: If there is an error, then how can this sort of user journey be fixed?
Thank you very much!
~Aivoric
If you want to deeplink to a specific piece of content inside an app from an advertisement or any other link on the internet then you need to look at contextual deeplinking.
Without contextual deeplinking...
In both cases, if the user previously had the app installed (but removed it) then the user will likely experience a popup error. I'm very confident of this happening in iOS -- a Safari "error" message gets displayed. There's no native fix with iOS that I'm aware of. You'll need to sync up with a 3rd party deeplinking standard that can handle platform detection and routing.
Contextual deeplinking would be one way to tackle all these issues because it would automatically detect if the app is or was previously installed. Then, it could drop information about the user context - what advertisement they came from along with any other deep link data - and carry this information into the app to direct the user to the deeplinked location.