Every time I go into a big shopping mall I am overwhelmed with the amount of people
and offers I can get. My safe place is always finding the next information waypoint and studying it insight out to make sure I’ll have the perfect path through this maze of offers and selections. One time though I did exactly that in a big shopping mall in Berlin, was in full swing of my shopping trip and wanted to grab some food before I was on my way out. I knew that I find this really nice pasta place on the 3rd floor right on the very back of the building. But guess what I went there really hungry and then the place wasn’t there instead there was a sneakers shop! Having a mild attack of hangryiness I asked around to figure out where the shop was and it turned out that its on the complete opposite side of the building. My patience ran out though at this point and I just went to the next shop near me and got a small piece of cake and left my shopping trip with a very annoyed feeling in my tummy.
I am sure you can relate to this feeling and relate to it even more so when you are on a website and you click on a link in full expectancy that you’ll end up at the place you got suggested but then complete and utter let down and you see sth that is of no relevance to you at all and just feel lost. You see that suggested website for maybe 5 sec and leave or if you are really really desperate you might take the trip to go through the entire product to find what you were originally looking for.
After that trip through the shopping mall I realised that I had a massive flaw in my product that I was working on and I wanted to figure out how I could make that better for my customers. Working for a search engine can be quite similar to setting up a shop in a shopping mall. You need to have the right shops that related to you but not in competition and you need to know where you position yourself exactly. I took that analogy to bring it into my website. We had users coming from all over the world, with different mindsets, different needs when they were coming to us looking for their answer and they found some of those on our product but for other answers we needed them to visit other websites. It is a truly great way of partnering up as no single product as much as you would like it to be will solves all needs of your users along their journey, not even amazon. So it was the same for us and we picked the best partners to help with those problems for our users.
Unfortunately that didn’t show in the engagement of our users on our partner product nor did it show in our bank accounts. So I made it my quest to understand with user interviews, smaller a/b tests on where we deeplink each user and each user bucket to not give them disappointment that i felt when I just wanted my plate of pasta. The results of the tests exceeded our expectation, within one week of testing we already managed to double our income when another month passed we were able to keep that growth trajectory from the first week and managed to develop a small monetisation test into a massive delight for our users plus a very healthy income that was not coming from our main income stream.
After that I realized this simple formula: healthy deep-link = happy customers = good b2b partnership
cross device deeplinking is key
check on all devices
create customer segments understand what is there most needed thing right now
create hypotheses based on your user journey around what these customers might - need at the point you deeplink and test test test test on those clusters
test with small user interviews and what they expected to see
test with a/b tests
make sure you have tracking feeding back from your partners website