What to ask your agency about deep linking
The advice here is unglamorous, which is probably why it gets skipped. If you are briefing an agency or a freelancer on deep linking, these questions are worth asking early.
Mobile releases are slower to correct than web ones, so the cost of shipping a mistake is higher. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.
Questions worth asking
- Who will actually do this work, and have they done it before?
- How will we know afterwards whether it worked?
- What happens if it needs changing in a year?
- What are you assuming that we have not confirmed?
What a good answer sounds like
Every shareable screen should have a URL. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.
Test the case where the app is not installed. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.
What this looks like day to day
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
- Broken links from email and ads waste real spend — and you know whether that is true here
- There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped
Worth checking on your own setup before it becomes someone else's problem to fix.