Some of these pages only triggered a few app downloads/new users. At one point in France, if you searched for any artist or song, you obtained Deezer as a first result. Again, these pages are indexed and accessed through Google, allowing for app discovery.īut those pages were not allowing direct access to the content, which is what Deezer and Spotify did, with amazing results on acquisition and retention. Then, they put in place mobile landing pages dedicated to a deal. For example, My Little App (the app of My Little Paris, providing deals in the city) started to showcase deals on their app landing page. The first attempts to expose app contents happened on apps’ landing pages. It’s the same for apps, app indexing is all about app discovery: letting people discover your app based on what’s inside by exposing its contents upfront. Then Google indexed all web pages so that you can find what’s really relevant for you. Is that how the web works? Solely with descriptions of websites? Well, it used to work like this before Google existed: Altavista and Yahoo provided sorted listings of websites with descriptions.
These are places where you describe what your app does and what’s inside. You might be asking yourself, “Why do we need this?” There are two main assets to showcase an app: a web landing page (with a description and a few screenshots) and the App Store’s pages. You search, you click a result link, and it opens the app directly on the result. I’d define app indexing as: a mechanism that allows exposure to app contents in search results, with direct access to the content. You may already have a good understanding of what app indexing is, however, app indexing is still in its evangelization phase, and my hope is that this article will expose new people to this trending topic.
They are strongly related subjects, for which having a good understanding of deep linking is crucial (in fact, deep linking is required for app indexing to work). And even recently, I published an article on deep linking to explain the reasons why I don’t recommend building it in-house anymore, along with the in’s and out’s of app indexing. He helps companies ranging from startups to large groups for which mobile is a key issue.įor the last six years, deep linking has been a subject I’ve passionately researched and pursued. This is a guest post written by Alex Jubien, an independent consultant for mobile strategy.