Deep linking

Deep links are a great addition to your mobile marketing toolkit. Deep links allow you to send a user directly to a specific section, or page, of your app. These are great for if you have a call to action that will take your users to a sale or want the push message to send them to a certain account page.

In this topic:

Requirements

You’ll need to be on any SDK version above 4—any version previous, you’ll want to use key/value pairs to manually parse out deep links from within your app’s code.

For those above SDK 4, as long as you have the custom URL scheme registered, the SDK will automatically tag the opened event and launch the deep link.

URI schemes for apps

Mobile deep links function just like website URLs. When you type a URL link into a web browser, you’re providing the browser with a string of text, which the browser interprets. If you type https://uplandsoftware.com/localytics/ into the browser, it recognizes the URL as valid and loads the Localytics site.

Just like a URL is an address for a website, a URI is the address for an app on a mobile device. A deep link points the user to a specific part of your app.

Example: In the following deep link, temps://showZipcode?90210, the first part (temps://) is called the URI scheme. It must be registered by your app and must be a unique value. (Your website might be https://temps.com, and you’ve registered this custom domain exclusively for your company.)

The URI scheme must be unique, so your device knows exactly which app to open when it sees a specific URI scheme.

How deep links work

Setting up a URI scheme enables the device to know which app to open, but deep links allow you to do more—to direct a user to a particular destination with your app.

For example, for temps://showZipcode?90210, the app should have logic that evaluates showZipcode and the numerical value 90210 and generates a view of the weather for the zip code 90210. Most apps tend to handle deep links the same way—so your deep link should look something like this: myapp://destinationPage.

See the Apple Developer website for more information about using URL schemes on iOS and about using universal links; see Handling Universal Links in the Localytics iOS SDK documentation; see the Android Developers website for information on enabling deep linking on Android; or see the "Mobile Deep Links Basics" blog on our partner Branch.io website.

Testing deep links

To test if your deep links work (independent of Localytics):

  1. Type the deep link into a mobile browser.

  2. As long as you have the app downloaded, your phone will recognize the URI for your app and open it.

    • If your deep link is correct, your app should immediately open to the page linked.
    • If your user doesn’t have the app downloaded, they’ll be taken to the app store when your URI is called by the device.

Note: If you run into an issue, check with your Development team to make sure you’ve got the correct URI and deep link scheme.