Kahuna has a way to make app notification links super personalized

Suppose you see a push notification on your phone about tickets being available for the upcoming basketball game between the Golden State Warriors and the Minnesota Timberwolves.

If you’re Adam Marchick, CEO of mobile marketing platform Kahuna, you’re a big Warriors fan. Now imagine that, when he clicks on the link in the notification, it takes him right to a Warriors-branded shopping cart inside his installed tickets app, with the four tickets he usually gets already populated on the screen.

This kind of personalization is common on many websites. But not so in mobile apps, where links like this often merely take you to the start screen of the app, or maybe to a page for the Warriors game — not a shopping cart filled out with the order you specifically would want. So today Kahuna is taking a step toward changing that with its release of Dynamic Deep Linking.

Links deep inside apps don’t work like Web links in websites, since there isn’t an HTML standard for apps. In recent years, mobile deep linking has enabled a link within an app or a website to go inside another app and land on a specific screen, instead of just opening the app and showing its home screen.

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But that kind of deep linking showed a specific screen that everyone clicking that link would see.

Yozio recently released a SDK so that a link for an app install can open the app to a specific screen once it’s downloaded. That screen, for instance, might show preloaded credits that came through that referral link.

Mobile app tracker AppsFlyer has developed the ability for, say, a link in a mobile hotel ad to direct the user to the appropriate travel app download, and then, when the app is opened, show the page inside the app for that advertised hotel.

But that link is specific to the content — the hotel — and not the person. Everyone who clicked on that mobile ad for Hilton Hotels would see the same Hilton Hotels screen in an installed travel app.

Kahuna is taking this one step further, by enabling links for apps to utilize the personal history of the person clicking the link. So a specific customer, for instance, might be taken from a link in a push notification about Hilton Hotels to the Preferred Guest page for Hilton Hotels in her travel app, because of her good history with the American Express card.

“What we’re doing that no one else is doing,” Marchick said, “is utilizing deep linking to drive [sales] conversion” by taking users to personalized locations within an app in one hop.

Kahuna’s previous ability to send a personalized message inside an app, he said, raised sales by 40 percent. Now, based on testing in the just-completed beta phase of Dynamic Deep Linking, Marchick said this new ability to send a user to a personalized page is causing the increase in sales conversion to hit 66 percent.

Since there is no standard yet for deep linking, this kind of personalization is limited to Kahuna’s app customers.

In its implementation, the dynamic link is referencing in realtime the personalized information on that user in Kahuna’s marketing platform, and then populating the destination with the appropriate information.

While Kahuna is currently using Dynamic Deep Linking within an app, or between a push notification and an app, it can also be used app to app, or between a message in a mobile web page and an app.