Five mistakes teams make with deep linking

It is rarely the thing that gets a project approved, and often the thing that decides how it goes. These are the ones we run into repeatedly when we audit deep linking.

Mobile releases are slower to correct than web ones, so the cost of shipping a mistake is higher. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

The mistakes we see most

• Treating it as a launch task rather than an ongoing one
• Assuming someone else already owns it
• Every shareable screen should have a URL
• Broken links from email and ads waste real spend
• Never checking whether the fix actually worked

Test the case where the app is not installed. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

Turning this into a decision

The short version

You do not control the device, the network, or the operating system version, and the design has to accept that. Three things worth confirming about deep linking before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Test the case where the app is not installed — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Most of the value here comes from doing the first two things, not all of them.